


Heart and Mouth

by disenchanted



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Canon Divergence, Hallucinations, M/M, Past established Relationship, Post-Episode: s02e13 Mizumono, sex and murder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-24
Updated: 2014-06-24
Packaged: 2018-02-06 01:26:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 36,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1839322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/disenchanted/pseuds/disenchanted
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will returns to Hannibal.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Heart and Mouth

  _i. haunted house blues_

Down by the river, herons made nests in the old oaks. Lodged in the leaves, perched on the upper branches, were tufts of withered grey sticks: kindling, it occurred to Will to think. You could knock down a nest and start a hearty fire with it. But they were nests, and there were living things inside them. Will saw the herons most often in groups of three, a big one and two babies, the babies stomping their thin legs and squawking disconsolately, begging to be fed. 'Sounders of three,' Will once said, laughing to himself. In the lower branches lived wrens and warblers, caterpillars and black ants and cicadas.

The cicadas in summer sung a long low song that drove as deep as the roots and as high as the tops of the mountains. Keening, gurgling, wailing; that sort of song. They shed clear brown skins that clung in clumps to the slats of the new house, the pillars of its porch, the torn screens in its screen doors. Sometimes Will saw a cicada half-emerged from itself: a living thing, green and shiny-eyed, near to flying from its spent skin like a body flying free from its ghost. Will would unlace his boot and swat the sole against the thing till it went flat and dropped.

The soles of Will's boots saw, too, the bodies of ants and horseflies, June bugs and stink bugs, mosquitoes and mosquito hawks, yellowjackets and paper wasps. He felt a thrill at killing indiscriminately. Someone would say, while letting an insect crawl along his forefinger, 'The paper wasp feeds on the fly. The predator feeds on the pest. Do you not suppose, Will, that to kill the wasp is to deny yourself an ally in the killing of the fly, which you desire also?'

Will did not suppose so. The someone did not know this house, and would not see what Will made of himself here. He swatted the flies first and the wasps second. He knocked the wasps' nest from the eave of his porch. He fixed up the porch swing and there sat drunk on malt liquor, smoking Winston brand cigarettes, patching his old denims and watching the wind move through the trees.

Before Will bought the house, the woman who owned it said to him, 'You know—I'm going to tell you something—you know I don't believe in _that_ kind of thing. I never did believe. But I will tell you that this house is something else. It wasn't five days ago I came in here to clean some things out and do you know what happened. I went to open the front door, this door you see right here in front of you, and do you know what else I found but that that chest of drawers that had been in the hallway had been put right up against the inside of that door, like it was someone who didn't want something getting in. God's honest truth. I don't know who could have moved it. I tell you I do not know a living soul could have done it. This house has been vacant half a year.'

'Uh-huh,' Will said. 'Probably burglars.'

The house had been the woman's mother's, and the mother had died a month after a man left four bodies bleeding into the black guts of a house in Baltimore; so eight months before Will sold the house in Wolf Trap and bought another one farther south. Not too far. It was Virginia still, somewhere in the thin southwestern tip, a hollow in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

'Born and raised,' the woman said of herself; she made a point of it because Will wasn't. It hurt her to sell the house she had been born in, and for sixteen thousand dollars in cash handed over by a man she knew only as a New Orleans ex-cop. Will saw how carefully she untangled the wind chimes her mother had hung. He took the house from her anyway.

The woman had left without taking the wind chimes down. Out of some sentiment, or some sense of duty or guilt, Will kept them up. He set them right when strong winds twisted the strings. They sung even when the air was still, and Will wondered whether they weren't stirred by a spirit who wanted to hear what music it could. He wondered then what he would haunt when he was dead. A thing he had loved. He could not think of the things he had loved. It was better to think he had not loved at all.

'You have loved a great many things,' someone would say. 'Perhaps you do not see love for what it is. Or what it was, before it ceased to be; or what it will be, when it begins to be, again. In matters such as these, the heart deceives the mind, the mind deceives the soul, the soul deceives the heart...'

Someone else would say, 'He isn't telling you these things; you're telling them to yourself. You're imagining what he might think because you don't trust yourself with your own thoughts.'

Someone else would say, 'I think that when you care about a person for a long time, you start to think like them. I don't think it's permanent, though. I heard my thoughts in my dad's voice for a long time, but I don't now.'

Someone else would say, 'You're the only person here who knows how that man thinks. I need you to help me. I need you to tell me what he's thinking.'

_That man_ was thinking that Will did not see love for what it was. He was thinking that he would not love Will again. Not so purely, not so deeply. Not so well. He was thinking that Will had forgotten what it was like to feel sober, as Will had once forgotten what it was like to have a mind not burning. He had been so close to loving Will, then. Love had welled inside of him like milk; he had only to release it. He anticipated the pleasure of companionship. What had Will done but bifurcate the both of them: leave them split into Hannibal and the Will who lived in Hannibal's mind, and Will and the Hannibal who lived in Will's mind. The mind was not its own place. The mind was a house with an open door; the mind was a bed with two bodies in it. That was what Hannibal Lecter was thinking.

If Will drank enough, he could fray the ends of his neurons till they were deaf and mute and no signals passed between them. His head had been so god damned clear, before; he had seen so god damned much. He saw, now, the turning of the blades of the porch fan; the sunlight and shadow moving over the ceiling, through the turning blades; the insects passing through the sunlight and shadow. The wind chimes tinkled and pealed. The paper wasps were building another nest.

He would let this one alone, Will told himself. He was not a cruel man, he did not knock down nests. There were some things in this world that did not deserve to be lonely and transient, though Will did not count himself among them. He drove drunk out of the woods and into the sun-soaked valley and miles to the nearest gas station. There he bought two bottles of malt liquor and a carton of Winstons.

The front door was open when he returned. He had had half a bottle during the drive down and felt nothing at the sight of the doorway open and black and with a farther window showing through like the gleam in an eye. He retrieved the Beretta he kept in his truck, felt that it was loaded and flicked off the safety. The black doorway seemed to draw him in by the barrel of his gun. What was in there? Some low shadowy thing lay like an organ hidden beneath the flesh of the house. Through the walls he heard its grumblings and pulsings. When it rippled the floorboards he opened his eyes, held his breath and pulled the trigger. Flecks of the floorboards flew outwards. His ears rang. The hole showed only the cellar.

In the front room, with the Beretta in his hand, Will waited. That day, he thought, would be the end of his stay in that house. That day he thought would be the recommencement of love. In order to see it for what it was, he would stop drinking. There were footprints in the carpet, size twelve and stocking feet and a light step.

'Watch for the wasps by the door,' Will called out.

The door blinked open and closed with the wind. Dark flecks sprung towards the paraffin lamp he had lit. The sun, slowly, was drawing down; dusk was taking hold. Will waited for a brush of lips or a hand on his neck or whatever else it was. Clarity. His vision. As if he had summoned it, he had the vision of three herons crossing his threshold, sweeping through the front room and out the window which, on the opposite wall, gaped open. Someone had knocked down their nest; they could do nothing but fly through that house of spirits.

Will woke to see the lamp dark and the dawn up, and no one beside him or before him or entangled with him. The Beretta had fallen to the floor. There were no footprints in the carpet. The door blinked open and closed.

 

* * *

 

In that hot haze between summer and autumn, Will's teeth began to ache. First slowly and dully, like there were tiny brains in his mouth that were tired and had slight headaches; then all of a sudden sharply. He began to mash his food with his fork and swallow it down without chewing. His ribs showed through veined skin.

'I'm not going to tell you to quit smoking,' someone would say, sitting down beside him and passing him a beer. 'But you should quit smoking.'

Someone else would ask, with wide blue eyes and a quiet voice, 'You're going to be okay, right?'

'Tell me what you need,' someone else would say, slamming their palms on their desk. 'A doctor? I'll get someone on the phone. We can't have you out of the game, not now.'

The fourth voice, because Will was in pain, had gone quiet. That was what the thing in Will's mind wanted: for Will to take a mouthful of whiskey and grimace at the alcohol burning through the cracks in his teeth. Now that he did, the thing settled. Still Will ground his teeth while sleeping. He woke in the night to find his jaw clamped shut as though he were an infant refusing a spoonful of peas. When the pain was very bad he heaved but did not vomit.

Late one night, he drove down to the gas station and hit a split in the road, which sent him jolting towards the ceiling of the cab of his truck. His jaw struck up against his skull and a tooth shattered soundly. Outside the gas station, beneath the flickering floodlights, circled sometimes by a beetle or a moth, Will spat a shard of his tooth into his sweaty palm, where it lay cushioned in a syrup of blood, spit and sweat.

At the station Will bought a pack of bright red emergency candles. When he paid, he ducked his head and watched his hands, all the while working his tongue over the jagged edge of his tooth. He was unshaven and long-haired but imagined the cashiers saw him and knew him.

'That's that cop was having the affair with Hannibal the Cannibal,' he imagined one cashier would tell the other. 'I swear to God. I read all those articles in the Post. They was just up in Baltimore. I don't believe it.'

Not long after he had got out of the hospital, Will had tried to buy some dog food and a can of tuna; the cashier had turned off the light on his register and without a word walked into the stockroom. Will had looked more like himself, then. His cashier at the station counted him out correct change but did not wish him a good evening.

When Will returned to the house in the mountains, he softened the candle wax and pressed it into the broken place. His father had done it that way. Will saw without wanting to see the smears of dirt on his father's shirt, the yellow of dirty fluorescent against bathroom tile. He felt himself small and expectant, peering, waiting to be given the chance to do good by his father. The chance never had been given to him. His father, if roused from his grave, would say that Will was a shit of a kid, still. He would have done just fine fixing up boats on Erie, except that he had had some ideas about catching killers and had caught himself instead a knife in the gut and a taste for wine. Will was glad his father had not lived to read the articles about his son and Hannibal Lecter.

Pus began to leak through the gaps in the candle wax. Will went feverish. He lay on the sofa in the front room and watched the trees through the windows, listened to the ticking clock, drank whiskey from the bottle so as not to mind the pain. He once sat up and found that he lifted out of his body, which slept beneath him. He saw one sun rising and one sun setting, the both of them in the same red sky. Images fell through him: a blade, peeled skin, hairs prickling up from something pink and bleeding. A human lip flapping over a tiger's teeth; human hands cracking a human jaw. In the room a wasp occasionally whirred.

Will felt, rather than saw, the softer things. A humid press of lips to the side of the mouth, a brush of hands across scraped knuckles. His half-empty body yawned open and hungry for such kindness, such trust.

The scales, the soul, seemed to stand in the mist on the opposite shore of some long lake. He did not want to enter the water. He did not want to be righteous. But to be held... For all those years, Hannibal had felt the longing to be held.

If he swam up from whatever depths held him, Hannibal would go to the house in Wolf Trap. That was why Will had left it; why Will had vanished from his own life. He had wanted not to be found. By whom. Everyone—else but. Hannibal had foreknowledge and would know where Will had gone. Then why had he not come? Why no footprints in the carpet? Why no mouth full of sticks to build a new nest? If Hannibal felt the longing, still.

Will watched a wasp crawl along the arm of the sofa. Another one was trapped, buzzing despondently, behind the window curtains.

It didn't matter. It didn't matter. Will would die. He was forty and dying. He could not save anyone any longer. He had so little life left in him that to toss out the rest was a formality, almost.

Before he went out, he would go to the house in Wolf Trap. He pulled on his jacket, pressed a thumbful of fresh wax into his mouth and started up his truck. He was as good as there; he was as good as safe, or as much in danger as he had ever been. The new house stood empty behind him and he rattled out of the front drive and sailed into the blue dusk.

His high beams flashed— No, it was his head flashing. The high beams in his head flashed. The strobe light on the table flashed.

'You're acting impulsively,' Hannibal said. 'You're taking risks.'

Hannibal took Will's face in his hands.

Will said, 'I'm doing what I damn well please.'

'Are you? … I feel no pleasure in you. I feel pain; I feel you struggling inside yourself like an insect in a jar. You will save yourself only by'—(somewhere far above them, glass was breaking)—'breaking the glass.'

'That glass,' Will said, 'has been broken for a long time.'

'It has been cracked,' Hannibal said. 'Not yet broken. Through the cracks you feel a wash of wind; you see a bit of sunlight.'

Fondly, Hannibal smiled. He touched his lips to the side of Will's mouth; he touched his lips to Will's lips. He gave cloying, clinging kisses. Their mouths felt glued together by sugar-water. Hannibal parted Will's mouth with his tongue; lapped against Will's teeth; pried open Will's jaw; licked into Will's molars; bit. He chewed through Will's lips, tongue; he spilled blood and swallowed it. His teeth were made of bright metal and he gnawed through Will's jaw till there was only a dark maw of meat thinly pulsing. Kissing then was a rubbing of the maw against Hannibal's lips. They passed bits of Will's teeth between their mouths and longed for nothing.

The strip lights above Will flashed—flickered; light interspersed by a few flecks of dimness. Flies had got caught in the glass. Will was supine, swaddled, his head screaming shrilly. In his hand there was the familiar twinge of an IV line. His mouth was dry and—he ventured his tongue to feel—full of cotton wadding. It felt as though his insides had been shook up in his skin.

He was at the hospital nearest the new house; he found out from the person who came to draw his blood. Later one of the doctors told him he had run off the road. Will remembered nothing of it but the strobe. Negligible injuries—sticks and stones—bruises and a broken nose. A mild concussion (the doctor's face blurred into the wall). They had noticed the tooth and called in an oral surgeon from a practice a few towns over.

'Where were you headed?' the doctor asked.

Will wondered if the doctor was being conversational. He opened his mouth and with great effort said, 'Wolf Trap.'

'That's a ways from here. You have family up there?'

'No,' Will said. 'I don't have family.'

The patient who shared his room did. Silhouettes passed over the surface of the divider curtain. There were nieces and nephews, sisters and brothers, an elderly mother, a wife. The man had got his gallbladder taken out. There was a daughter, too: for the first day Will was awake he saw her silhouette and imagined her dark-haired, fashionably dressed, her hair braided in the way of young women who rode horses. A pain grew in him independently of his injuries.

'I brought you this,' Abigail said. She was approaching with a sealed bowl. 'It's just Campbell's.'

Visiting hours were long over; all lights in the room had been put out but for the thin strip hung on the wall over his bed, which hurt his eyes. He saw, when he strained to look towards Abigail, that a bright unreal purple obscured her. He had wanted to see her for so long that he ached at not seeing her. His face wrenched into the sobbing-mask, but he was quiet.

'You're going to be discharged tomorrow,' she told him. 'I'll be happy for you to come home.'

'Come here,' he said. Weakly, with a numb, tingling hand, he patted the open space to his side. His fingers brushed against the dull knit of the hospital blanket. Then a touch of feathers. 'Sit. Tell me how things've been going. Your target practice? You get up to eight hundred yards yet?'

'Hannibal's going to teach me to shoot a .45. He says, “Every craftsman needs to know his tools.” He's teaching me to draw, too.'

Abigail had not stepped closer. She stood with the bowl of soup in her two hands, her face obscured, her body as crumpled and shapeless as a bad puppet. Her elbows moved into her ribcage. Her bones crossed through each other. Her face emerged from the purple: her eyes blinked wetly from the left of her forehead, her nose struck out from her cheekbone, her mouth tore downwards. She lifted her dozen hands to wipe at her tears.

Will did sob, then. What had he done for that girl but mutilate her; degrade her even, her self and her spirit. He had pulled the blade along her throat. If he had loved Hannibal in the way Hannibal had wanted, Hannibal would have let Abigail live. They would have stayed together in a red-roofed villa in the south of France, eating sea almonds and Venus clams, wetting their feet in the surf. In some alley thick with eucalyptus they would have closed their hands around a man's neck and dragged him away. Then they would have roasted that pig and crusted him in sage and parsley and served him with Chantecler apples.

The breeze would have been hot, delicious with salt and foam. The sand would have coated the soles of their feet. The water would have washed off the sand. Pain throbbed through the root of Will's tooth— _wake up_. A figure in a white linen suit stood on the balcony overlooking the sea. Next to it stood a figure in a wide-brimmed straw hat and a white peignoir.

Will was awake. Fishing boats rocked through bright water. Will was awake. Herons dived into the waves.

 

* * *

 

A storm rolled in not two days after the hospital. The sky went black and let down rain; all the drought-struck rivers and gulches filled with rushing water. Will sat on his porch swing with his wasps for company and watched the dirt of the woods bubble and spill. He saw then the dim smudges of the trees slowly illumined by headlights.

He had the barrel of his rifle pointing towards the driver's side of the windshield before the car was a hundred yards from the house. As the car pulled in behind Will's truck, the driver's window rolled down; lightning burned the sky white for a long second, and in the frame of the window, Will saw curls and a leather jacket and a gloved hand.

Raising her voice above the rain, Freddie Lounds said, 'Pull the trigger. I bet you ten bucks those tremors in your hands will throw the shot.'

'So you don't have more than ten bucks to spend, even on a sure bet. Still spending all your cash on motel rooms, Lounds?'

'Not if someone nice lets me stay over. Why don't you give a lady some shelter? Offer her some coffee.'

They sat together in the front room, Will in an armchair with its stuffing spilled and Freddie on a sofa draped in yellowed lace, both of them drinking whiskey from cracked cups. The curtains were moth-eaten; through the holes, beyond the dirty glass and the bars of the porch pillars and the tangle of distant branches, the two of them saw the sky break black and white.

'Lucky for me you gave the hospital your name,' Freddie said. 'Not your brightest moment, unless you were asking to be found. Your blood work showed you were driving drunk. How's your head feel?'

'Fine,' Will said.

'My “get well” card is in the mail. But I thought I might drop in and give you my well-wishes in person.'

'Get in a few snaps of the backwoods hut Will Graham's condemned himself to. The exclusive on _Where They Are Now._ Except that it's a little patchy when two are in the ground and one's vanished.'

'Not that you get news, here.' She shot a sidelong glance at the broken radio. 'He could be captured and tried and convicted and you wouldn't hear a peep. It's funny; I never thought of you as the type to hold your hands over your ears. … How long has it been since you've seen Alana Bloom?'

'A while,' he said.

'Her sister drives her back and forth between her house in Arlington and a psychiatric hospital in Massachusetts. It must be difficult, don't you think, for such a proud psychologist to fare so badly in treatment. It's always easier said than done.'

'You know your business well enough to know that you don't need to wear me down by telling me about Alana Bloom before you get on to whatever it is. There's no good reason but your own pleasure. How does that feel, Freddie. How long has it been since you've seen anyone who's looked at you with anything but disgust.'

'It might feel good, talking about what we've all been through together.'

Will rose abruptly from the armchair and turned away. A full-skin shock of anger had him inwardly sizzling; thunder snapped and rattled the brittle window-glass. It was like something hard being broken, that thunder; like bone being broken. When the thunder snapped again Will imagined that that was the bone being set. Then the thunder snapped again.

Freddie had downed the rest of her cup; Will saw when he turned to her. She looked at him carefully, her eyes light and bespeaking something of woundedness.

'You can tell me to leave,' she said. 'There's a Knights Inn twenty-five miles from here, and my car's got all-wheel drive. But if I left right now and sent a letter to you about what I knew, you would write begging me to make the drive back. So cut the shit and save me the gas money.'

'You always did believe in yourself,' Will said. 'There was someone else who believed in himself.'

'That's the gist of it,' Freddie said. 'Though I have a funny feeling you knew that. I'll trade you something good for that bottle.'

Will took the bottle of whiskey from the side table and tossed it to Freddie, who caught it with both hands. After she had poured herself a brimming cup, she pawed through her bag and drew out a manila folder. Hefty, tattered, spotted with Chinese takeout duck sauce; but no fingerprints.

Handing it over, Freddie said, 'Happy early Christmas.'

Will snorted. 'Christmas isn't for months.'

'Maybe,' she said, 'but I doubt you'll have visitors between now and then.'

'I get a few tumbleweeds rolling through. I dress them up in old shirts and have tea parties with them.'

'Go on,' Freddie said, 'open my present.'

Will held the folder on the table of his two palms as if it were some ritual object. The heat of the things inside began to burn through his calluses. He decided only after he had opened it that he did not want to open it. His conscious mind, upon seeing what his body had wrought, came staggering to a stop; the landfills of his mind, the ugly things he had long since covered over, began to seethe. And buried somewhere in that refuse was the small snapped wishbone of his tenderness. There was a time when he had liked to kiss Hannibal on the lips, softly.

'Three in Normandy,' Freddie said. 'Nine in Paris, six on the Riviera, three in Provence and three up in the Alps. I put the pictures more or less in order. The local police haven't connected the dots; they wouldn't know a Ripper murder from an act of God.'

Will said, 'Not that anyone would.'

'I don't give him that much credit.'

'You wouldn't. The worst you got was me pulling you out of a car.'

Freddie's brow raised. She folded her hands in her lap and looked idly out the window.

'Could've been gutted,' she conceded. 'Wasn't. Then again I wasn't sleeping with Lecter.'

Thunder so deep and resounding that it seemed to come from the center of the earth, shaking the foundations of the house. The windowpanes shook in the frames; a sheet of rain smacked the glass. Neither Freddie nor Will flinched. Will thought about how there must have been someone caught out in the storm, alone, plunging through the mud at the side of the highway or sitting it out beneath a tree. He had been caught out in a storm, once, and had imagined that everyone indoors considered only their own comfort; he was miles from any house but he envisioned lit windows.

'You haven't broken the story yet,' he said.

'I wanted an expert opinion.' She looked towards him again. The line of her vision was sharp and unerring. 'It's nice to have a fact-checker, sometimes.'

Will laughed. 'Never seen a pathological liar that was so bad at lying.'

'And I've never seen a heartless man so heartsick. Been drinking much, Will?'

'Come on,' he said, 'and tell me what you want. I doubt the price of this folder is a half-empty bottle of whiskey.'

'You think you could find him on the strength of this?' At Will's silence, she went on to say, 'I could break the story now. Get a few hits, some ad money. Send everyone into Ripper frenzy again. You don't remember much about how it was a year ago, do you? No one would give out their business card. … Well, then Lecter would know we knew, and it would be the goose chase all over again.'

'Go find him yourself,' Will said. He shut the folder; he had seen well enough what was in it. 'All that hot air about my dangerous mind and you're asking me to use it for you. Fuck you. Give me back that bottle.'

Freddie held out the bottle and said, 'Hand over the folder, then. I'm not above take-backs.'

Will did not take the bottle. He found he was clutching the folder so tightly that he had bent the card stock. Now his fingerprints were on it, and only his. Freddie could hand him over to the cops and say he had known about the murders and was keeping his ex-lover's secrets. The public could chew the cud of their respectable notions; back then they had said, _The freaks were made for each other_. The National Enquirer had run a feature on their sex practices. All of that was farther from Will than the Riviera. Still he felt himself very immediately and physically disgusting. He felt as if his skin bulged in an effort to contain some ugly sludge. Hannibal had cut him open; then the bad things had been gathered up and sewn back inside him.

'I'll keep this,' he said.

She said, 'Then I'll keep this.'

When Will escorted her to the porch, they saw by the light of the porch lamp that the crumbling road leading away from Will's house was half-sunk in muddy water. Rocks and sticks and brush had floated onto the paving. Torrents of water passed like crossings over the dips in the road. A wasp circled Freddie's head; she removed a glove and used it to swat the wasp dead against one of the porch pillars.

'You should get an exterminator up here,' she said. 'Poking the hornet's nest is my bag, not yours. If you're trying to kill yourself there are better ways to do it.'

'I don't knock down nests,' Will said.

'You always were a little Saint Francis.'

'You think you're gonna make it back to town?'

Lightning burst concurrent with thunder. Without glass to soften it, the noise was real and crisp, startlingly loud. Will sometimes forgot the force of nature. The whispering of the wasps seemed laughably small against the storm; they were only little things, interchangeable, living and dying in weeks. … Probably the road was too rough even for Freddie's all-wheel drive.

'Respectfully,' Freddie said, 'I'd rather die in a ditch than stay in this hole.'

'I'm giving a lady some shelter,' Will said. 'You would rather live.'

Freddie had spent thirty years developing her talent for self-preservation. To abandon it out of spite would be to let Will get one over on her. She slipped her glove onto her hand—it had wasp guts on it still—and turned towards the front door, though kept her eyes on Will. The wind chimes clanged.

'That time with Abel Gideon,' she began, not quite meeting Will's eyes. 'I thought I had a lead on something good, and I took it. Turns out the only thing I'd taken was the bait. Once Gideon had his gun on me, I didn't have much say in what happened next. Which was me up there in the observatory squeezing an Ambu bag while Gideon pulled out Chilton's viscera. All I could do was keep squeezing and hope that if the Ripper showed up, he and Gideon would go at it and give me a chance to duck out. Then Gideon left to find you and it was just squeezing the bag till the FBI showed up. I got blisters on my hands.'

'You would have left Chilton to die,' Will said.

'If it was a choice between me getting away or the both of us dying together. … I'm saying I made a choice that brought me to that place. When I was there it was all I could do to keep moving through it. Opening the next door, then the next. I don't regret it; it was an interesting experience and it gave me something to write about. If I had known what would happen I would have done it anyway. Likewise, if I knew it would happen again, I would do it again.'

'Like a dog returning to its own vomit.'

Freddie said, 'Let's get out of the storm, why don't we. The humidity doesn't do much for my hair.'

In the front room again Will sat at the table and cleaned his Beretta while Freddie sat in the gutted armchair and tried not to doze. When her eyes drooped closed and then shot open, she seemed for a moment to be horrified to find herself there. The bottle of whiskey, which she kept in her lap, rose and fell against her stomach as she breathed. Maybe she would sell it at auction, or hand it off to some profiteering shithole of a private museum. Will would let her keep it.

He had often thought about the photograph Freddie had taken of him in his hospital bed, the sheet pulled back and his bare groin blurred out. Now it was another man's shame, something Will saw as a speck in the endless black space of his mind. The speck approached from a distance, came near to him, then passed out of his field of vision. Rain fell and the chimes echoed.

Next morning, while the trees above him dripped with the remnants of the rain, Will stood on his front porch, his hand pressed up against a wooden pillar, and watched Freddie Lounds' car bump furiously down the road to the highway. Fallen branches crushed and snapped under the wheels. Every now and then there was a wash of water as she passed through a puddle. The car grew smaller, the noises dimmed, and in the end there was only birdsong. Then a quiet humming.

Will felt a tickle on the hand that held the pillar and saw that a wasp was perched at the center of the back of his hand. Sometimes it twitched or flitted its wings. Will could see it in such minute detail that he could work out its coloring, the bands of yellow and black. Two yellow spots peered out like gentle eyes from its abdomen. Unafraid, Will waited to be stung and found that he was not. The wasp stayed for a while, then lifted off and flew.

 

* * *

 

When the sun came out, the heat had the wet ground steaming, giving off the scent of rot and regrowth. The sweet air of rainy days warmed into musty autumn. The trees were reddening. Will woke early one morning to take a walk down the bank of the river, see the herons, follow the flow to the falls. The drop down—the thin ribbons of foam and the cloud of mist at the bottom—looked gentle. The sun glimmered in the spray.

In the year he had lived in that place, he had not learned how deep the pool went, or where the river led. He supposed he would leave without finding out. Time passed so quickly; the sun was nearly at its highest point, and it had only just been dawn. It had only just been a year ago. He had only just been green.

Will turned back and traced his path along the river till the house, where he got in his truck and drove to the farmer's market in town. A vendor there sold live ducks; Will chose a fat Muscovy with black wings shining iridescently, splattered in places with tufts of white feathers. He tucked it into a cardboard carrier and kept it at his side as he went down the line of stalls.

'You keeping that duck for a pet?' one of the vendors joked.

Will shook his head. 'Gonna eat it,' he said.

Laughing, the vendor said, 'Thatta boy. Fix him up good. Hope he tastes all right.'

'He will,' Will reassured him.

For the rest of his supper Will chose handfuls of smooth red-skinned shallots, blades of mace and sprigs of sage. Each of these ingredients he weighed in his hands, turned over, inspected, chose specially for its fineness. He would not have another Virginia dinner for a long while.

At the house he sat with the duck in his lap and watched the early sunset. The sky gave over from blue to orange to a richer blue; the feathers beneath his hands were soft. The duck called loudly for the first few minutes and then settled and was quiet, having begun to trust Will.

Will said, 'I've had days worse than this. It isn't so bad out here. Not so bad. They're right when they say it feels like coming up out of water. It's clearer and you breathe better. Then you go under again and you forget what it's like. I'll forget what it's like here so I won't miss it. … I don't think he knows about all that. I think he was drowned from the first. Some cruel thing dredged his body up and made it walk and talk again. Made it grow up. But he's got the stench of a corpse in water.'

Though the sun had gone down, there was a bit of light left. The trees stood black against the twilight. Will took the duck around back and elongated its neck over a cutting board. In a short sweep of the arm he brought the blade of a cleaver down on the neck and so severed it cleanly. The body began to bleed into the grass; in the dim light the blood ran black. The head, with its dark blank eyes, quivered and twitched out of reflex, seeming some small organism in and of itself. It was still by the time Will had drained the body out. A circle of blood sunk into the soil.

Long ago Will had been able to eat meat without killing the animal himself. He wondered whether Hannibal ever thought about the man he had been before he was the man who killed what he ate. Whether he mourned for that gentler self. Will thought he did.

While Will cooked, he listened to some old records of Bessie Smith, who warbled through static into all the wide dark hallways and the empty rooms. Years ago, before Hannibal, Will had unearthed the records from a box of junk hidden in a stall of a dingy flea market. He had liked to collect things, then. He had just bought the house in Wolf Trap and wanted to make a home for himself full of things he adored and which brought him comfort. Now, as he plucked and cleaned the duck, he remembered with a sudden clarity how he used to think about the world. The shape of his circumstance had been clear to him; he had known where he was and how he had got there.

A couple years working homicide in New Orleans he thought had shown him just how nasty humans could be. There had been an awful lot of spilled guts in those years, and it was frightening then too. It had felt like the bottom was dropping out of something. He seemed to have tapped his heel against hard-packed earth and found that it collapsed and gave way to darkness, like a trapdoor opening up onto another world. There was fire in there, and bodies. Going up to GWU to study forensics, he thought he was scrabbling onto higher ground. He was afraid of falling.

He was also happy, in the way you see only afterward. He slept well some nights and he sometimes went out with someone, a fellow student who tolerated his temper and his inscrutability. He thought often about the future: some job with the Bureau and a red brick house in Northern Virginia, a couple of dogs and maybe a partner who would hold him even when he was sweaty with nightmares. When had he stopped imagining what would happen to him?

With Hannibal, in the beginning, before he knew, he sometimes allowed himself the image of a big clean house, high ceilings, oil paintings on the walls, a kitchen for Hannibal, some land for the dogs, a bay window where Abigail could sit and draw in the sunlight. He supposed he stopped all that when he knew, or a little after.

What had he known? There was an infinity of things to be known. There was an infinity of falling.

Beneath his breath Will mumbled along with the record on: 'There'll be a hot time in the old town tonight, baby...'

The shallots and sage he chopped up and tossed with salt and pepper. As he took pinches of the stuffing in his hand and slid it into the hollow of the duck's body, he felt the press of a crisp-shirted chest against his back. The fragrance of verbena and bergamot, held fast by ambergris. A crawl of breath over his neck.

'Go slowly,' Hannibal said. 'Take care with it.' He slid his hands along Will's waist, steadying him. Those were hands that had brought pain, and were now bringing Will— 'Pleasure. Take care,' Hannibal said, 'take pleasure.'

When Will had finished with the stuffing he turned as if to turn into Hannibal's arms and gather himself up against Hannibal's body. Like all shades, Hannibal vanished when touched. He had not gone away; Will felt his presence like a beating heart sewn into the air. It was only that Will did not see.

Over the fire in the open hearth, Will basted the spit-pierced duck and roasted it quickly. The heat of the hearth pressed like a hand to his face; he squinted against the flame. It was soothing to watch fire. Let it burn the house down, he thought. Let the whole place go down. Ashes and bones. But by the time he removed the duck from the spit, the fire was down to charred wood speckled with red spots of burning.

The duck found its rest on a blue china plate that stood broad and immaculate at the center of the dinner table. Will had sliced oranges, too, to border the plate; he had arranged crisp tufts of greens. With its ornaments, the circle of china shone like a monstrance in the shadows of the house. Already the house was vacant, the two place settings bereft of purpose. The food was nothing more than an offering; the steam and the scent wafted into the air.

Will closed and opened his eyes. He saw before him the table, the plate, the meat; the window, the trees, the starlit sky; fire and bodies. He saw before him himself. He pulled out the chair at the foot of the table and took his place at the head.

 

* * *

 

A year earlier, somewhere in the dry heat of the autumn after the summer after the spring of the end of Hannibal, Will received a letter at the house in Wolf Trap. The letter was written on mauve stationery.

> _My dear Will,_ it began.
> 
> _Do you remember much of our first October? Our habit then was to sit in my garden and eat fresh green olives as the sun set. The air was warm and you spat the pits into your palm. On one of those evenings I told you that man wants nothing but to know and to be known. You disagreed; you asserted that above all man was frightened of being known. You were frightened, I know, but what you are is not 'man'; that name is for the others chiefly. You have such empathy for them that you forget you are not one of them._
> 
> _By now you will have come to know a great deal. You with your keen eyes—have you allowed yourself to see? Do you know what I saw as I held you? You will hold it inside of you forever. You have only to look._
> 
> _Not long after I left you, I saw the_ Spinario _at the Musei Capitolini in Rome. The curls in his hair recalled you to me. A print of Genga's drawing of the statue hung on the wall of my kitchen in Baltimore, though I imagine it now rots in the dungeons of the Bureau. It once caught your eye—I was searing salmon at the time. Looking at the picture, one wonders whether the boy will ever pull the thorn from his foot. I suspect not. I hope you are in less pain than he._
> 
> _Have you given up your fishing? If only you could see the color of the water along the southern coast of France._
> 
> _I am thinking of you always._
> 
> _Yours,_
> 
> _Hannibal Lecter._

 

* * *

 

_ii. the devil's gonna get you_  

Overnight, mist had settled. Fog had washed over the roofs and spilled into the streets; had perhaps eased between the grates and entered the catacombs. A slight autumn rain fell, still. Raindrops spotted Hannibal's face and rolled down to his jaw. Even on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, the air smelled as cool and sweet as freshly washed china. Hannibal envisioned a teacup submerged in rushing water: the stream filling the cup, spilling from it, in an endless passage of clean, clear water.

He was three minutes early for his appointment. Before he entered the gallery, he lingered for a moment on the step, looking up, peering past the dripping eave and into the fog. Vague shapes seemed to move beyond that cover. So, alas, did the world beyond him move... He rang the doorbell of the gallery.

Today he was looking over a chest of drawers, a product of the transition from the Louis Quinze to the Louis Seize style. The piece possessed proportion and eloquence; the rosewood was smooth and matte, the cabriole legs even, the inlays finely crafted. Circles of brass bay leaves enclosed the mysterious hollows of the keyholes.

'The key and the lock are functional,' explained the _antiquaire,_ after she had brought him into the gallery. She brandished the key; the brass caught a sparkle of lamplight as it turned.

'Marvelous,' Hannibal replied, slipping a finger along the top edge of the chest, feeling for imperfections in the red-veined marble.

The marble, he found, was chipped in places. The slats of wood in the bottoms of the drawers had warped, exposing slivers of empty space through which small objects might fall. Hannibal, far from being displeased, felt his sensibility tickled by these imperfections. The attempt to reproduce in new furniture the wear effected by real use was as embarrassing to Hannibal as a man who gave himself a scar to demonstrate his hardness. He liked to look at a piece and see in its chips and gouges the places where history had occurred. He liked long exposure photographs for this reason also. Compressed within the image was an eternity of waste and repair; of water filling and spilling from the cup.

Most importantly, he liked the chest of drawers. He resolved to have it. He would place it at the end of the corridor, perhaps beneath a mirror.

After making arrangements to have the piece shipped to his apartment in Saint-Germain, Hannibal bade a warm farewell to the _antiquaire._ He walked for a while along the right bank of the Seine before turning onto a footbridge, upon which he stopped to look out over the river.

The water was black and showed no reflection. The fog dimmed the farther bridges and obscured the place where the river bent out of sight. It seemed then, with the rain falling densely, that the river flowed towards a grey nothing.

In such weather the outdoors felt closed and intimate, and Hannibal was disposed to linger. He worked his way into Saint-Germain slowly, with an eye to the pointed-toe flats splashing into puddles, the drip of umbrellas onto herringbone shoulders. The people around him seemed to yield themselves to his vision: they turned when he desired to walk past, but slowed when he wished to look closely at a piece of jewelry or the pattern on a silk scarf.

It was early in the day and the outdoor markets were open and abundant. Hannibal was taken by a particular taste, so bought a fresh Dover sole and an assortment of cockles and mussels, which he intended to cook with buttered bread crumbs and a white wine sauce. In his mind the meal composed itself; the tender flesh of the sole, the briny grit of the mussels, the garlic and the butter and the dry, mineral wine passed over his tongue, at first in single notes and then in chords. The meal would be stimulating and light. He would open a Chardonnay he had been anticipating.

A part of him pitied himself: he would eat and drink alone. Dr. Fell of Paris was a solitary man, very unlike Dr. Lecter of Baltimore. Hannibal had snapped the strings of his instrument. And how white his hair had grown, and how much he had learned of regret. The salt air of bays and oceans stirred his sentiment; so too did the taste of pressed coffee, the sound of dogs' paws against wood, the color of blood when spilled from the veins in the throat.

But was there not pleasure to be had? There was the Chardonnay. There was his translation of Huysmans. There was his painting; he was doing a view of the Église de Saint-Germain-des-Prés. There was the chest of drawers he would place at the end of the corridor, beneath a mirror.

He unlocked the iron gate to the courtyard of his building. Doves in the courtyard cooed; wind stirred the ivy which clung to the yellowed walls. The soles of his shoes grit against the dirt on the bricks. He passed through the door, into the dust-motes and mildew, and ascended the stairs to the fifth floor.

On his landing, before a small window which looked out over the courtyard, Hannibal caught a scent.

Stale tobacco (here Hannibal saw shaking fingers crushing the filter of a cigarette); yellow bile (spat from bloodless lips); the putrid burn of cheap whiskey; the filtered air of an international flight. Unwashed cotton, semen and sweat... Then rotting oak leaves; rain-swamped grass; roasting flesh; spilled blood; the blood on the rain-swamped grass; and dirt beneath fingernails; and fingernails between teeth—and tear-salt; so—

Will appeared in his mind as a vision, whole and fully formed. The stains on his flannel shirt; the dried blood on his jacket; the cracks in his nails and the cracks in his lips. The blood vessel that had burst in his eye; the growth of whiskers on the underside of his chin. The eyelashes long and the eyes pale and blank as a fog.

Hannibal's blood moved very evenly through his body. His lungs and his heart pulsed in tandem. Coolness enveloped him; he was serene. Will Graham had ached also, he knew.

Will's presence in the apartment, the scent drifting through the door, was as natural as if they had never stopped living together. There was a hollow for Will in Hannibal's everyday life, a side of the bed and a chair at the table. Whether Will would fit himself into the hollow, climb into the bed—

On the other side of the door, Will would have heard Hannibal's footsteps on the landing.

'Will,' Hannibal whispered, in the way he had whispered Will awake in the mornings. He listened for Will's breathing; perhaps Will listened for his. When Hannibal woke Will—in the early mornings before Will's classes, beneath soft shafts of sunlight—Will would say, 'Yeah. Mm. What,' or sometimes 'G'morning,' or sometimes, dryly, 'Hello, Hannibal.'

They would not be so happy again; that time had passed. They could perhaps grasp at peace; staunch their longing.

Hannibal took his key from his pocket and unlocked the door. He closed his eyes. Sparks leapt from the inside of his eyelids; the door creaked in swinging open; the light from the landing window fell against his face.

There was a shifting of fabric from the man sitting in the armchair. There was a thickening of the scent. A stirring of that scent through Hannibal's; a joining of them. Inside Hannibal were a thousand delicate paroxysms of delight. He did not know if Will had come to kill him.

He said, 'Hello, Will,' and opened his eyes.

'Hello, Hannibal,' Will said. There was a great tiredness in his voice and in his eyes, and in his gait as he rose from the chair. He seemed to have come home to die.

Hannibal entered the apartment and locked the door behind him. He slipped the key into his inner breast pocket.

'I was just at the market,' he said, though Will could see well enough his shopping bag. 'Lunch will be sole in white wine sauce, and cockles and mussels. I'll make enough for two plates, unless you find you have another taste.'

Unbidden came the image of the kitchen in Baltimore: the sun through the skylight, Will's hair mussed, Will at the island drinking coffee and Hannibal at the counter filleting swordfish. Debussy on the record player. Abigail—in the hospital, yes, Hannibal remembered now; and they were making plans to visit her. How young Will looked then, how neat, with his short hair and his top button fastened; his soft eyes peering through his lenses. And how young he had looked when first spattered in Abigail's blood. He was as much a child as Abigail, then. In the Hobbs' kitchen, they were two children clinging to each other.

Perhaps Will did not recall those things. His mouth wrenched into a cruel smile; he laughed once, was silent, and then laughed for a good while. He was very drunk. 'Sole in white wine sauce,' he said. 'For lunch... Sole in white wine sauce. You've been to the market. … Did you sleep well last night?'

'Well enough, thank you.' Hannibal passed into the kitchen and transferred his shopping to the icebox. Turning to Will, he said, 'You're tired, I know. You would like very much to sleep. But you haven't yet found a bed in which you're able to fall asleep.'

In the kitchen were two wide windows which on sunny days had the room glowing like the snow-cap of a mountain. Today the light was dim and soothing. Shadows of the rain fell against the walls, the white marble counters and the white kitchen table. Will's footsteps echoed on the tile.

'No,' Will said. 'You can't do that. You don't know everything about me anymore. You don't know how I sleep.'

'I know you, Will.' Hannibal smiled; a downy fondness quivered at the base of his throat, in his chest, stirring and palpitating his windpipe and lungs. All his knowledge of Will burst like spring flowers from the soil of his mind. It had only been sleeping; it was full and colorful. 'Knowledge,' he said, 'does not pass so easily as trust does.'

'A lot of things have passed,' Will said. 'Trust, time, mercy.'

'Not mercy,' Hannibal corrected. 'There is no such thing. What we think of as mercy is only favor borne by sentiment.'

'So it wasn't mercy when you chose not to slit my throat.'

A slick of blood seemed to coat Hannibal's hands. He did not raise his hands, did not look down at them. The blood dripped from his fingertips and speckled the tile. … On the front walk of his house in Baltimore, beneath the cold spring rain, he had rubbed his wet hands over his wet face and in that way washed himself clean of all blood. He would have preferred to wash in the sea, or perhaps in the Fountain of the Seas on the Place de la Concorde.

If Will stayed and did not kill him, Hannibal would take Will there. He would tell Will that there was the place where he would have washed away his blood and the blood of the people they had both loved.

'It was much more than favor,' Hannibal said. 'Much more than sentiment.' Turning his head, looking at Will out of the corner of his eye, faintly smiling: 'It was an act of love, Will.'

Will balked. Hannibal had perhaps advanced the thought too soon; Will was hardened, dormant, encrusted in his own bitterness. Whatever Hannibal had cultivated was held safe in the soft flesh at the center of that citadel. It stirred; Hannibal saw it flicker in Will's eyes.

'It would have been an act of love to let me go.'

'I gave you a chance to go,' Hannibal said. 'I asked you before you betrayed me whether you did not wish to ask for my forgiveness.'

'Not to go, though, not really. It was a chance to go with you.'

'Imagine if you had taken that chance then, rather than now.'

'I've imagined,' Will said.

'Yes, that was always what caused you pain—imagining. Tell me, what did you imagine?'

To ask was to drop the match into the oil-slick of Will's mind. However quickly Will shut himself against it, his mind's eye would move quicker. His eyelids flickered; his irises pulled from side to side. When he spoke, his thoughts seemed to bloom visibly from his mouth.

'I imagined us running,' Will said. 'The rain on the windshield of your car as you drove us to the airport. And Abigail in the back with her hair dripping wet from the rain. And Alana and Jack in their homes, safe. … You asking us where we wanted to go, telling Abigail she could go where she liked. The name on her passport was Cordelia Melmoth. You had been teaching her French and she suggested Paris to please you.'

'In this fantasy, was I pleased?'

'You were proud of her.' Will's lip twitched. 'You were proud of both of us. You had been teaching her Italian, too. You looked— You looked fondly at us.'

'I would have,' Hannibal said. 'And I would have liked to do it.'

'If Abigail had lived,' Will said, 'it wouldn't be something I was telling you about imagining.'

'I know,' Hannibal said. It felt as if a needle was threading between his ribs. He would have liked to keep Abigail too.

'You ever imagine anything, Hannibal?'

'A chateau in the Loire Valley. Parterres and pink roses; cloisters of hedges and small gurgling fountains. Or a _palazzo_ in Venice; marble _oculi_ on the walls, and frescoes of the life of Saint John the Baptist; and in the drawing room, an oval spinet by Cristofori. Or bowls of mixed wine on a hill overlooking the harbor of Corinth, and Abigail in the dress of Artemis.'

'And me?'

'And you at my side. … I imagine you most often—in summer, with your cheeks and your nose a touch burnt. You wear white linen shirts; when you turn to face the sun, the light shines through the linen and shows the silhouette of your body. You drink bourbon in the late afternoon. When it is very warm you lie still under shade, dozing in soft grass. I see the sunlight through the leaves; spots of light passing over your face as the wind stirs. You would see it through your eyelids; you would hear the wind through the leaves, and the evening crickets in the grass around you. Perhaps my bare feet in the grass as I approach you.'

Hannibal spoke slowly. Black bloomed inwards from the corners of his vision, and the kitchen faded. In its place rose the summer sun, the silhouette of Will's body through his white linen shirt, the sunlight through the leaves. The crickets chirruped in the grass. The scent of bourbon passed beneath his nose. The blades of grass tickled the arches of his feet. Then grey mist suffused the sunlight; the shapes of the kitchen windows, the counters, the table, grew sharper and more solid. The tapping of the rain against the window-glass returned.

Will looked as tender and small as he had when Hannibal had pulled the linoleum knife through his gut. He had the peace of the hopeless; he did not struggle towards happiness. That night, as Hannibal cradled him, Will must have thought of the rain on the windshield, Abigail's hair dripping wet: all of those things he had in his mind and would not have anywhere else. So it was with the summer, the bourbon, the grass. Will's lip was curled; tears gathered in his lashes, and still his eyes rang clear.

'It wasn't mercy,' Will said. 'You let me live because you saw this in me.'

'Your pain?' Hannibal asked. 'Or your redemption?'

'I had a dream about you, not so long ago. You said I was an insect in a jar. You said the only way I could save myself was by breaking the glass.'

'Do you feel you have broken the glass?'

'Why don't you find out for yourself,' Will said. 'Come closer. Come here.'

Hannibal took a careful step forward.

'I said come here,' Will said.

Hannibal came so near to Will that their breath mingled. Will's scent was thick as liquid; sweat was cold on his brow, dampening the curls of hair across his forehead, mixing with the remnants of rain. Will took Hannibal's face in his hands. His calluses scraped against Hannibal's skin and he panted hotly, shortly, against Hannibal's mouth.

'You don't feel any glass, do you. … Jesus Christ, you wouldn't. It was a dream. I'm no insect, Hannibal; I'm not anything. When I heard you in my mind, it was my mind making you up. You are not inside me. There are a thousand ugly things I've put into myself. Not you.'

Brushing his lips against the curve of Will's ear, Hannibal said, 'You have always been your own. When your hands were red; when you scraped your knuckles bloody; you were your own.'

Will's hands were slipping over the back of Hannibal's neck, grasping, scraping; but not closing. He was pulling Hannibal towards a kiss. Hannibal let his mouth linger close to Will's, that he might feel Will's inwards gasping.

'I was yours then,' Will said.

'As much as you were ever mine; which is to say, very little.'

'No, I was yours. … I want to be that again.'

'You want your knuckles scraped bloody again.'

'Yes,' Will said. He touched his open, shuddering mouth to Hannibal's. Softly, sighing, he bent forward into a kiss.

There never were such warm lips; there never was such gentleness. Will kissed almost in the way he had when he was first learning to trust Hannibal; when he believed that to kiss Hannibal was to peel open a space into which love could crawl. When Hannibal put his hands to Will's waist, Will eased himself close, steady and safely held. Will could not stop himself: at each parting of mouths, he returned with a kiss fathoms deeper. He begged something from Hannibal, pleasure or kindness; or death, which for Will, then, was the sum of both. He stroked his thumb along Hannibal's cheek. His body was hot and pulsing. Beyond them rain fell.

'You don't need me any longer,' Hannibal said. Will was half-kissing his speaking lips. 'You have long since molted. You could have enacted your vision alone.'

'I wanted someone who knew me for what I was.'

'What else did you want?'

'To be held,' Will said.

Hannibal held him. He secured his arms around Will's body; he pressed his cheek to Will's and felt how brightly Will's skin burned. He stroked a palm over Will's back. Gently, as he would a dying child, he cradled him. He hoped that Will felt a phantom pulling like a comet through his gut.

'You won't kill me,' Will said.

'I doubt it,' Hannibal said.

A plaintive moan echoed in Will's chest; Hannibal felt the vibrations through his body like a call from the deep. To pry that noise from Will's lips, Hannibal took Will's chin in his hand and kissed him. He tasted the heave of Will's cry.

'You're tired,' Hannibal said, then; taking Will's cheek to his shoulder, stroking his hand through Will's curls. 'I wonder, if you slept here, whether you would find some peace.'

'Let me sleep in your bed,' Will said.

While Will slept—sprawled atop Hannibal's bed, his bare limbs pale as the linen, the eiderdown pulled to the foot of the bed, strands of his hair shedding and clinging to the pillows—Hannibal cooked the sole in the white wine sauce. He washed and cleaned his _fruits de mer_ ; he steamed the molluscs and felt the air in the kitchen grow humid with cooking. He and Will were indoors and the cold autumn rain was far from them; and if he walked into the corridor, he could hear Will breathing.

Hannibal was garnishing the platter with bread crumbs and parsley when Will padded, in stocking feet, into the kitchen. He had dressed in his old clothes (but left his shoes in the bedroom); the scent he had collected hung about him in a mist. Even after rest, he had the starved, suspicious look of a mistreated animal. He squinted at Hannibal through his dirty lenses.

'Just like old times,' Will said.

'Eat with me,' Hannibal offered.

They sat together at the table in the dining room, facing each other, a centerpiece of white roses between them. A window spilled watery light down the length of the table; in the polished wood, their silhouettes swam and sunk. Hannibal opened the Chardonnay and poured two glasses.

'A toast?' Hannibal lifted his glass.

'To bloody knuckles,' Will said.

'Bloody knuckles,' Hannibal said.

Their glasses chimed. When Hannibal drank, the wine was bright and crisp, with a glaze of apple on the tongue.

 

* * *

 

The sun set before the dinner hour. On the balcony that opened up from the sitting room, Will stood smoking, breathing plumes of purple fog into the night. The city spread outwards in shards of light. Will obscured most of what was beyond; he stood hunched, protecting his cigarette with a cupped hand, the lines of his face faintly marked by the light of the street below.

'Is this it?' Will spoke without turning to face Hannibal, who stood a step behind the threshold of the balcony. 'You don't think I've brought the FBI hot on my heels? I'm not going to wake up to see the apartment cleared out and you gone off to Rome or someplace? You just let me in?'

'I would have known,' Hannibal said, 'if you had brought them to me. I've smelled your guilt once; I know it now.'

'Or maybe I've gotten better at lying,' Will said.

'Worse, if anything. You haven't practiced since we parted.'

'Don't you wonder how I found you?'

'You found my calling card.'

'Christ,' Will said. 'You could call it that.'

'We can speak frankly with each other,' Hannibal said. 'You saw who I killed, then.'

'Yes, I saw who you killed. Come out here for a second; the rain's not too bad.'

Beyond the threshold, the air was cool and damp. A breeze rustled Hannibal's hair, his pinstripe shirt; the minutest rainfall moistened his skin. Will turned, cigarette perched on his lip, to look at him.

'Want a drag?' Will asked.

'No,' Hannibal said. Even from afar, the smoke was hot, thickly aromatic, heavy on the tongue and in the throat. Hannibal knew the taste as Will's.

After drawing from his cigarette, Will said, 'You knew I left the house in Wolf Trap, didn't you?'

'I imagine you would have,' Hannibal said, though he had not known. He thought of the house empty, the shingles falling, the shutters snapping open and closed; the house as it was when Will was imprisoned. It had begged sympathy.

'You ever send any letters, after the first?'

'Only the one.'

'You could have said more about how you loved me,' Will said. A cold smile pulled his lips taut; the corner of his mouth twitched.

Hannibal had, in his manner, told Will how he loved him. Olives, the Spinario, the color of the sea; they were all things that made him yearn. Will had not wanted Hannibal's yearning. His cruelty, perhaps; something with which Will could have broken himself.

'Don't look so sour.' Will laughed. He drew deeply from his cigarette, turned his head up and exhaled towards the sky. No stars were out; the fog lay low. 'I don't care what you wrote in the letter. I know what you think about things. … It's damned stupid of you to do this and you know it. If I were you I would have killed me as soon as I saw me.'

'When I saw you in my sitting room this afternoon? Or when I saw you in Jack Crawford's office and you told me not to psychoanalyze you? Or when I visited you in your cell at the hospital and knew that you had seen me truly?'

'When you knew I had the capacity to know you,' Will said.

'I'm not frightened of being known,' Hannibal said. 'Not by anyone with such a mind as yours.'

'That's what I mean.' Will flicked his spent cigarette over the balcony; he leaned against the balustrade to watch the orange speck fall. Tilting his head towards the sky, he said, 'You got caught because you couldn't stand being alone. All those years of killing and you shot it to hell just to have someone who could lie in your bed and look at you and see you and tell you you'd done good. All those people around, those swarms of flies on your kills, and none of the right ones ever saw you. Never anyone clever enough; you're a beggar and a chooser. There's nothing worse to you than not being known.'

Hannibal said, 'You've been alone. I suspect you could have sought solace elsewhere; with Alana Bloom, with Margot Verger.'

'You think Alana Bloom or Margot Verger would speak to me? No, you— You know better. There isn't a person left who can stand the sight of my face. I've cut myself out; I've been excised. If I had anything else I wouldn't be here.'

'Then you have found you can't bear solitude, either.'

'Maybe not,' Will said.

The rain was thickening. Will's hair was curling in the damp air, sparkling with raindrops. The shoulders of his shirt were darkening. Hannibal felt, along the side of his face, a lone raindrop working coldly down to his jaw.

Retreating from the balcony, Hannibal said, 'I'm stepping indoors.'

Will stood outside for a while longer. When he returned to the sitting room, his face was dripping wet, shining in the lamplight, and he shivered.

'I should take a bath,' he said, passing into the dark corridor. His footsteps rustled against the parquetry.

Hannibal, at the mouth of the corridor, saw the slant of light from the bathroom widening as Will drew open the door.

Silhouetted in the doorway, Will turned; down the length of the hall, he said, 'Come in with me. I want you for something.'

The bathroom, as Will lingered in his bath, went white with steam. The tiles dampened; water dripped down the tiles; the reflection in the mirror softened, then went blank. A hot mist rubbed away the finer details of Will's body. Hannibal saw, still, that just beneath the line of the water was the long white scar on Will's stomach. Shadows of hands and forearms rippled over it as Will worked soap into his washcloth. From the set of Will's shoulders, Hannibal knew that he was aware of his looking; even then he kept himself obdurately ordinary, his red knees rising up from the water, his elbows stirring currents as he cleaned the hair under his arms and at the center of his chest. The soap was Hannibal's _bois d'orange_.

Hannibal sat in the chair next to the vanity, his legs crossed and his hands locked over one knee, a thrill rolling through his skin. Inwardly he became warm and buoyant and felt himself removed from the solid forms around him. For the first time in years—decades perhaps; for the first time since his boyhood—he had the sense of unreality.

The white of the tiles, the pale blue of the bathwater, the brown of Will's skin, seemed all to have flattened against each other, as in a painting. The lines of the bathtub, the vanity, Will's arms and legs and the curve of his back blurred, went wayward and expressive. The walls leaned into each other, towards the bright point at the center of the canvas. Then the bright point disappeared—he was dipping his head beneath the water, rising, rubbing his hands over his face. Spots of reflection glistened on him like white paint dabbed carelessly.

Throughout most of his bath, Will was quiet. He had said earlier, while shedding his shirt, 'You want to look; I know. You want to see what your work has come to.'

Since he had opened the door, Hannibal had felt Will's scar glow from underneath his shirt. It had been, for so long, so unfathomably far from him; he had felt, when he thought he would not see Will again, a certain pleasure that the exact nature and appearance of Will's scar was unknowable. It had the beauty and might of the sublime. Its power was greater when it moved behind the visible world. When Will pulled his shirt from his shoulders, the scar was revealed and it took hold in the actual.

For all that the scar was a part of Hannibal which he had sewn into Will, it had not had the capacity to speak to Will, to observe him, to taunt him. It was not a living thing but a line on the body, like a stray brushstroke. Will had slept with it on him, had idly scratched it, had been naked and saw his own body and still failed to feel Hannibal's spirit in him. What was in his mind was more alive.

'You wouldn't have thought it would have healed this well,' Will had said, stepping into the bath.

He did not speak again until after he had cleaned himself and was rinsing the soap from his face. His hair hung in kelp-like tendrils down his forehead and his neck; Hannibal thought of the way drowned bodies look when on the slab, grey-skinned and opened up for an inspection of the dirty, brackish lungs.

Wiping his fringe back from his forehead, Will said, 'I want you to cut my hair. You have scissors, I wager. One of those little sharp ones.'

'Yes,' Hannibal said, 'I have scissors.' He was pleased at being trusted to improve Will, and with sharp metal besides.

Will knew what he had asked of Hannibal. He was cautious, tense and prepared to appease Hannibal: not, Hannibal saw, because he was frightened that Hannibal might cut his throat or put out his eyes, but because he felt Hannibal might be hurt by the reminder of his act. Did Will think Hannibal ought to be ashamed of his failure to kill him? Will was always ashamed of his own failures; but he had only ever failed at saving people for whom he cared.

Carefully, lingeringly, Hannibal dried Will, then dressed him in one of his own robes and sat him before the vanity, his chair turned away from the vanity's mirror. He retrieved his clipping scissors and let Will's overlong locks loose from his head. He worked more slowly than he might have done; he wanted Will to feel himself changing, becoming stroke by stroke more Hannibal's. It was what Will wanted, too; he closed his eyes and breathed so slowly that he seemed to still entirely. Hannibal might have reached out his brush and darkened the shadows under Will's nose and in the part of his lips.

In the end, Will stirred, and the shapes of objects began to protrude into space again; the farther things receded into the distance. Will was twitching slightly, breathing, blinking, unable to be fixed as he was. His face showed blood beneath the tanned, freckled skin; and his hair was drying, his curls setting. He was not a drowned thing. His scar was swaddled in Hannibal's robe.

The hair Hannibal had cut away from Will lay in heaps on the floor tile. Some stray curls clung to the shoulders of the robe or the back of Will's neck, and Hannibal cleaned them away with a cloth. He caught sight of a red mark shining in the short, dark hair that remained on Will's nape; he parted the hair with a careful forefinger and thumb and saw that on Will's scalp was a cut no longer than half a centimeter, perhaps from the end of a blade.

'I've cut you,' Hannibal said.

Will hummed an acknowledgment, but said nothing.

'Did you feel pain?' Hannibal asked him.

'Does it matter to you?' Will returned.

'If you did,' Hannibal said, 'it would have been senseless pain, and I would regret having caused it.'

Will made no response. He did not mind whether it mattered to Hannibal; it did not matter to him. He was affronted by having been asked to feel something—outrage or giddiness—in response to this small cruelty of Hannibal's. If he felt anything at all, it was disappointment: Hannibal saw it in the cast of Will's mouth. They had returned to the worst of themselves, the slow, petty picking away at each other. Hannibal would rather they return to tumult; to sprays of blood or at least a hand round a throat, no matter whose.

The scissors lay gleaming against the marble top of the vanity. When Hannibal took them up again, he saw his face flash in the metal. Presently the blades reflected the pinstripes of his shirt; he took them to Will's nape and, in clipping away a tuft of hair, scraped the edge of one blade against the skin, drawing a deliberate red line over the mark he had made accidentally.

Will did not flinch or cry out; but the hand he held in his lap twitched as if he were reaching for a weapon. After that tremor, he was monk-like, unblinking.

'Were your hands that bad when you were a surgeon, Dr. Lecter?' Though he was unsmiling, his voice was amused.

'I apologize,' Hannibal said. He set down the scissors and took up the cloth. After dampening it, he pressed it softly against the wound, watching the fabric redden with blood. His thumb rubbed absently against Will's skin.

When Hannibal drew away the cloth, he bent down to press his lips to the wounded place. Will's hair was soft and carried the burning-wood scent of the inveterate smoker. The scent of his wound struck sharply through; it was bleeding still, dampening the hair, trickling down his neck and blotting into the silk of the robe. Hannibal applied the cloth until the wound had gone dry.

'Would you like to see yourself?' Hannibal asked.

Without speaking, Will rose from the chair, returned his glasses to his face, and turned to face the mirror. He appeared to look through the glass and into some fascinating realm not their own. His irises did not break from a fixed point.

'That was what I wanted,' he said. 'Thank you, Hannibal.'

Will must have seen, in the mirror, Hannibal lean in to kiss his neck. He reached his hand behind himself to brush along the back of Hannibal's head, ruffling his hair; it was the gesture of a blind man exploring a strange stimulus. When Hannibal raised his head, he saw that Will had closed his eyes, and that beneath his eyelids his eyes fluttered. What did he see? Perhaps his own neck, the red of his newest wound, the darkening as Hannibal lowered his eyelids and leaned close to kiss beneath Will's left ear.

'You're welcome,' Hannibal said. His breath stirred against Will's neck; he felt Will's shudder with his lips, and leaned back. What Will anticipated, he could bring about himself, if he wanted it badly.

And so, Hannibal learned, Will did. He reached behind his back and caught Hannibal's wrists in his hands, bringing them forth to the tie of the robe.

'Untie it,' he said.

With Will's fingernails pricking into his wrists, Hannibal unknotted the tie and let the two ends slip down to Will's sides. The front of the robe parted to show a sliver of skin that was as mean and demure as the moon in waning crescent. Showing beneath the fur on Will's chest was the smooth skin of the scarless portion of his stomach; then a dark smear of flesh that suggested, more than revealed, his stiffening cock. Hannibal kept his hands limp in Will's.

Will had not opened his eyes. Blindly, he guided Hannibal's right hand to his stomach, wrinkling the robe as he crept their joined hands beneath the fabric. Hannibal felt, in the jostling, only the softest brush of fingernails against the raised skin of the scar. Even that chaste touch had Hannibal alight. He let Will fumble their hands; there was time.

'I had had scars before,' Will said. 'I'll have more after this one.'

Against Will's ear, Hannibal whispered, 'Who gave you the best of them?'

'I won't know till the end,' Will said.

Will's hands moved up Hannibal's wrists; he was unbuttoning Hannibal's cuffs, rolling his sleeves up to bare the savage streaks in his forearms.

'Ever get anyone who thinks you did it to yourself?' Will asked.

'Very few people have seen these scars,' Hannibal said. 'I'm fond of them for the reason I'm fond of yours; they are fragments of people who no longer live.'

'You mean us,' Will said.

'To wish to return to the past is fruitless,' Hannibal said. 'But the past can be possessed; it can be held in the body and known through the senses.'

'Like all your possessions,' Will said. While they were speaking, he had allowed his hand to fall, bringing with it Hannibal's. Their hands rested at the soft swell of stomach just below the scar, just above Will's cock.

Hannibal brushed his fingertips into the thatch of hair leading towards Will's cock. He did not go so far as to touch him. Still Will's skin grew warm; he leaned back into Hannibal, so that his hair tickled against Hannibal's face. His stomach rose and fell beneath Hannibal's palm.

'Are you afraid to touch me?' Will asked. 'Or are you disgusted?'

These questions, to which Will knew well the answers—Hannibal was not afraid, and he took certain actions against those who disgusted him—seemed to conceal some other curiosity. Did Hannibal know Will really, and would he let Will loose from the demand of moving him, leading him? Will had grown weary. His keenness was nestled in the down and cotton of stupidity. He would have let Hannibal puncture his throat with the scissor blades. His grip began to loosen.

'Not many men,' Hannibal said, 'can be trusted with the task of self-determination. They cause themselves pain, they cause others pain; by that I mean pain in its ugliest, most worthless state. You, Will Graham of the wild, elegant mind, have not only the capacity but the vision to determine your course. I would see you exert your power; I would see you choose.'

Will's grip tightened. 'I came here,' he said.

'To die,' Hannibal rejoined. 'You feel the world has been closed to you; you pretend not to know better. There is nothing you cannot take for yourself.'

'My youth,' Will said, more than a little wryly. 'The life where we drove to the airport, the life with the _palazzo_ in Venice, the life with the white shirt and the bourbon and the grass.' He spoke as if he were narrating the close of a play. He was exerting his power only in drawing the curtain on what pained him.

Will pulled Hannibal's hand up to rest against the scar. The flesh of the scar worked against the creases and folds, the calluses and the hundred healed blade-cuts held invisibly inside Hannibal's hand. The scar in Hannibal's forearm, too, met with Will's scar; this meeting-place of their pasts gave them only the knowledge of how they were altered. Hannibal had lied to Will. The world had closed to them all its channels but the narrow corridor of fate through which they, together, moved.

Hannibal ached with hunger. The swell of his cock, kept in his trousers, pressed snugly to Will's back. Will felt it; he brought himself closer. Crossing his left arm over those interlocked, he took himself in hand and began to pull viciously. He grimaced and gasped like a flagellant, whip in hand and unholy blood spilling down his back.

'You touch yourself,' Hannibal said, 'as though you refuse to admit pleasure into you.'

'God forbid I not—mm, admit something into me.'

'You have discrimination. You prefer one vintage to another. That is choosing pleasure for yourself.'

'Didn't the Epicureans believe'—Will's voice was strained, low under wave-like heaves—'that the only real pleasure is the absence of pain. That men who chase worldly pleasures lead themselves to a pain so great it destroys all the pleasure that came before it.'

'Of course there were the Cyrenaics, who differed on that point.'

Beneath Hannibal's palm, Will's stomach went taut and then soft erratically. Like that of someone who spat up blood, his breath caught wetly in his throat.

'You've forgotten it. —Remember,' Hannibal urged, soothing his fingers along Will's scar, slowing as Will quickened his strokes. 'Let it in.'

Against his front, Hannibal felt the releasing of the muscles in Will's back, and the simultaneous frenzy of the hand Will kept at his cock. Will's pulling at himself carried in it a strain of curious beauty; it was as if Will had been entered by some Chthonic god, brought down to the fire and soil beneath the crust of the upper world. The back of his neck was hot—Hannibal smelled his blood—and he was straining upwards to heave his cock into his palm.

'You were right,' Will said. 'I'd forgotten. I'd forgotten this.'

Arousal had compounded in Will, had become unbearable, had transformed itself from a desire for pleasure to an ache for a pardon from it. In the mirror, Will's face contorted. Hannibal's reflection, half-obscured by Will's, stared sedately at him, seeming one of those self-portraits which the artist slyly inserts into the shadows of a grander scene.

It was not pleasure that Will had forgotten. And onwards he pitched into the darkness, remembering. His stomach tensed; his head tipped back; he cried out.

'I don't—' Will began; but that was struck out by a groan dolorous as that of a creature dredged up from the beneath. His semen spilled over his hand and the top of the vanity. He went rigid, then slumped, surrendered to numbness, soft in Hannibal's encircling arms. There was a long silence; together they breathed.

'Been a while,' Will said at last, cracking open his eyes in the way of a newborn. Whatever he saw seemed not to be worth seeing; he closed his eyes again until Hannibal's fingers skimmed the length of his scar. 'Do you want me to finish you off?'

'If I dare chase pleasure,' Hannibal said drily.

'Give me a minute.' Will drew the robe around him and tied it at the waist. In doing so, he drove Hannibal away from him. Space enclosed his body, drawing a boundary around it. The picture was losing its evenness.

Will moved his hand instinctively to the place where his shirt pocket had been, square and bulging with a pack of cigarettes, and found that it met only silk. His discarded shirt lay folded, the pack in its pocket, on the small table in the corner. He took the contents from the pocket and exited the room.

Hannibal did not follow him to the balcony—after sex, Will seemed always to retreat into the place where he felt nothing, had no knowledge of his body—but cleaned away the locks of Will's hair, the errant streaks of his semen. To do so gave Hannibal pain. He preferred to be clean, but liked, after such a long loneliness, to be able to prove that Will had been there, had accepted Hannibal, had allowed Hannibal to cut away a part of him. Will had resigned himself to leaving evidence: if this little life of Dr. Fell's was washed away, Will would be swept along. To where would they run? Perhaps Argentina….

Hannibal was in the sitting room—reclining on his _chaise longue_ , his eyes closed, passing through the corridors of the palace of his mind—when Will returned from the balcony. At the sound of the balcony doors creaking open, Hannibal saw, against the stained glass window at the end of one of those inner corridors, Will pure and stately and with color dripping onto him. The light was passing into his body, glowing through his organs, shimmering at the tips of his nerves. Like a figure in a Vermeer, lit up in blues and yellows, he stood half-turned to contemplate the view from the window.

'It's getting cold out there,' Will said.

'Better that you're here,' Hannibal replied.

'I know,' Will said. His footsteps murmured beneath his voice. 'Stay where you are. Don't open your eyes.'

Hannibal imagined that Will's face, as he drew nearer, grew softer and more polished. The red in his cheeks was vivid; the shadows under his chin were cool blue. The light of the stained glass lined the edges of his face in blues, yellows and greens. A slight asymmetry—one eye narrower, one brow higher, one corner of the mouth lower—conveyed a pleasing imperfection, a certain looseness of brushwork. Will was moving forward in time. The craquelure was fading, the paint thickening and moistening.

The hardwood of the sitting room creaked as Will knelt before Hannibal, posing himself at Hannibal's right. This incongruous sound seemed projected into Hannibal's corridor from above. When the Will in Hannibal's mind knelt, his bare legs were noiseless on the stone.

'I want to suck your cock,' Will said. Hannibal saw, in his mind's eye, Will sweeping his tongue over the crease of his lips as if testing their give.

In their previous lives, when their liaisons were, for him, scraps of relief torn out of a life that was no more than stumbling through a burning house, Will had shied away from cock-sucking. Before his imprisonment he had wanted only a rough, senseless rutting; that had been his way of running from the fire. To hear from Will an expression of such unequivocal desire stirred Hannibal. He had softened during the intermission, but found that at the sensation of Will's weathered hands unfastening his flies and untucking his shirttails, blood moved purposefully towards his cock.

After Will had loosed Hannibal's cock from his trousers, he parted Hannibal's legs. One eased over the side of the chaise, foot resting on the floor, and one drew up into an inverted 'v'. Will leaned forward across the lowered leg to insinuate his head between Hannibal's thighs. His left hand gripped the near end of the cushion, and his right took hold of the base of Hannibal's cock, brushing incidentally against his balls and into the pale brown gathering of hair. He worked Hannibal gently into a cockstand. With his fingertips, he lavished touches on the place where Hannibal's foreskin drew back from his shaft; he rubbed upwards sometimes to the crown.

'I had a dream like this,' Will said, nuzzling his nose into a sliver of exposed stomach. 'More than one dream. They were mostly the same. You touched my hair and the side of my face and said I was doing well, I was good.'

'During these dreams, did you ejaculate?'

'Yes,' Will said. 'Always before you. I would wake up sweating, and with come in my shorts.'

Hannibal envisioned Will, in blue morning light, stripping away his soiled shorts and stepping into a shower, washing his soft cock furtively, bewildered at the pleasure he had felt. Hannibal's cock warmed, pulsed with blood-flow.

'What do you believe your mind was considering?' Hannibal asked. He took a hand to Will's cheek with the aim of easing away his shame.

Will turned his cheek into Hannibal's palm. 'That I hadn't touched anyone in a long time. That a part of me liked being made to feel servile.'

'What about the dream made you feel servile?'

'I was trying to please you,' Will said. 'I wanted you to like what I was doing to you.'

'Perhaps it was a sort of release for you,' Hannibal suggested, 'to desire and to act according to my will. To give yourself to another.'

'I thought you wanted me to determine my fate for myself.'

'I suggest only an interpretation,' Hannibal said. 'One of many possible. I might advance the theory that the figures in a dream are manifestations of the self. That the Will in your dreams was an aspect of your psyche closely allied to your waking self; and that the Hannibal of your dreams was an aspect held at arms' length, one you consciously denied while perhaps unconsciously desiring.'

'Or,' Will said, 'I could have wanted to suck your cock.' He smiled; Hannibal felt the shift of skin, the pull of muscle, against his palm.

Caressing Will's cheek, Hannibal said, 'I don't doubt that you do. … May I watch you?' His eyelids flickered in anticipation of opening.

'You see something, don't you? In your mind.' Will's breath, as he spoke, dampened the skin of Hannibal's stomach. Leisurely he drew his mouth towards Hannibal's cock, letting his lips come so near to the head that Hannibal felt the flow of air alter—but no nearer.

'I see you,' Hannibal said. 'Or a part of myself that I hold at arm's length. A part concerned with righteousness, with justice.'

'You don't hold off that part of you. Justice is your life's work. It's only that you deal it capriciously; you're always talking about God and his church-striking.'

'How would you go about dealing justice?' Hannibal asked. 'Surely you wouldn't rely on your hands to do away with all of the transgressors.'

'I wouldn't do away with them,' Will said. 'I would make them suffer.'

'You would be a Dantean god.' Hannibal felt along Will's skull, slipped his fingers into Will's hair. 'Perhaps with less delegation. Certainly without caprice; but not without a certain cleverness. No cruelty without wit, no wit without cruelty.'

Will pressed his lips to the head of Hannibal's cock and said, 'Look now.'

Light, then; globes of lamplight curving across the wallpaper, in some places dimmed or cut out by shadows. Smears of reflection in polished wood, window-glass, silk upholstery. Two points wavering in Will's dark eyes, and Will's dark eyes glowering. He tilted his head so that the suckling of his mouth at Hannibal's cock fell into shadow. The noises of it rose into the quiet room. Along Hannibal's body, thrills crawled like spiders: working beneath his clothing, spinning silk from his cock to his stomach to his throat, leaving bites burning in his skin.

Hannibal looked fondly at Will. He rested his fingertips in the mass of Will's curls and smiled at Will as he would have smiled at Abigail wishing to go to Paris, wishing to please him. When next Will lifted his head, Hannibal saw that the glower had dropped away. Will's eyelids fluttered nearly drowsily; his jaw slackened and he lapped his tongue along the underside of Hannibal's head, seeming too overcome with feeling to close his lips around it.

Curled loosely at the base, Will's fingers trembled, and Hannibal's cock slipped from his mouth. As he bowed his head to give chase with his mouth, his hand sought purchase at the shaft, grasping as if pleading. His touch recalled to Hannibal the touch of someone who, in the later stages of being choked, reached behind themselves and brushed their hands along Hannibal's shoulder or cheek, hoping that they might yet loosen his hold. In Hannibal's guts and thighs and in the root of his cock, threads of pleasure tangled brightly.

'You're doing well,' Hannibal said, with a voice as hot and thick as coal-dust.

Waves of fire seemed to rise up around them, circling them, washing their bodies in unbearable heat. Will licked at Hannibal ferociously, sometimes in long, firm strokes of the flat of the tongue along the shaft, sometimes in small, needy nursings at the tip. Strings of spit spilled from Will's mouth to Hannibal's cock. Guttural noises sounded at the center of his throat, humming through his lips and tongue.

'I want to hear you,' Will said. 'I want to know it's you. Tell— Tell me how you would kill me. What you would do to me after.'

'That's not for you to know,' Hannibal said, softly smiling, petting the side of Will's head. 'One mustn't ask after one's fate. I don't.'

Will closed his mouth; the head of Hannibal's cock pressed into the crease of his lips, but did not part them. His fingertips rubbed idly along the shaft. Beneath thick lashes, his eyes had gone dull and still as they did when he stood looking over remains. He seemed to vacate himself, so that although he breathed, blinked and shifted, his body seemed some dead thing moving in spite of its deadness, like a corpse filled with swarming insects.

In such quiet, Hannibal's arousal felt distinct. Sweat dripped, heat prickled. At the places where his clothes clung to his sweat-damp skin, he itched deliciously. He felt, apart from any physical stimulation, a severe tremble of desire. Will had come to him; Will was on his knees; Will's mouth was on his cock. Will was crawling back into his nature.

'Are you with me, Will?' Hannibal asked.

Will lowered his eyelids, then his head. His lips parted; his brow furrowed; a faint awareness seemed to swim through his eyes, stirring his irises.

'It feels good,' he said.

'Good,' Hannibal said. He traced the shell of Will's ear with his fingertips, then lowered his fingers to Will's lips, pressed between them, parted them. The heel of his hand brushed against his own cock. Will's lips were wet, still—they shone with spots of lamplight—and opened easily to Hannibal. 'Do you feel this?'

'Yes,' Will said, 'I feel it. I'm here.'

Then he shut his eyes, gave a long, sucking kiss to Hannibal's fingertips, nudged them away, and closed his mouth around Hannibal's cock. The wetness and warmth had Hannibal's head tipping back, his fingers dimpling the silk of the chaise. Color rose to Will's cheeks. As he sucked at Hannibal's cock, the curls of his fringe shuddered against his forehead. He was awake again, whole again; his own cock was stiff again. He seemed—devotedly licking, sucking, kissing; in essence consuming—to be forcing pleasure onto Hannibal, demanding that Hannibal take what he gave him.

Such a wealth of things lived inside of Will: the blood, the bile, the muscle, the marrow, the teeth, the tendons—the nerves, firing so rapidly that they nearly burst from his skin. Some inner spirit moved this congregation of flesh. Hannibal wished he could reach into Will's body and clutch at his soul—for Will did have a soul, though Hannibal was only a mind pulling at the strings of his instrument.

The urge to finish began to mount. Hannibal began to want, contrary to his nature, to feel the same pleasure again, again, like a string plucked at regular intervals. Will wanted for him to tip his head to the side and swallow thickly, to be lapped head-to-toe by heat, to press encouraging touches through Will's hair. Then to groan, to tremble, to part his thighs more widely. Hannibal supposed he ought to let Will have it.

'Will,' Hannibal said. 'You're very good. —You're very good.'

'I'm gonna swallow you,' Will mumbled.

The phrase recalled to Hannibal the way Will had looked when with a length of PVC tubing dilating his esophagus. Bared, tilted up, his throat had bulged; his eyes were white slivers, and spots of light shuddered at the tip of his nose, the swells of his cheekbones and his furrowing brow. The quality and angle of the light had shown how well Will's face was made. That he gagged hopelessly, that his eyes rolled in their sockets, served to bring his beauty into high relief. He was beautiful because he was beautiful, and because he was Hannibal's.

And so he was again, though he resided in his body now, and had Hannibal at his mercy. Hannibal was pliant and responsive to Will's feral sucking. He leaned back and surrendered himself. Pleasure bent down from great heights and sank its talons into him and carried him away. Will did swallow.

Whatever Will had hungered for—servility or approval or suffering—he seemed to have taken into himself. The stone had been rolled over the mouth of the cavern, and Will was closed in with the thing he had consumed.

He leaned forward, clutching his hands to the chaise cushion and resting his cheek against Hannibal's thigh, despite how the wool of his trousers must have scratched. He was facing Hannibal, and in his softness of countenance, appeared to be almost penitent, denying that he had needed this. A drowning man, once rescued, always insists that he had not been drowning.

Hannibal fastened his trousers, shifted to open a space on the chaise, and said, 'Come up, why don't you.'

Will did, though not without a display of some querulousness. Stiff and discomfited, he lay against Hannibal, in Hannibal's arms. Because Hannibal cared for Will, he took Will's head to his chest and stroked through his hair as if putting him to sleep. Hannibal liked, more than anything else, to treat Will tenderly.

'I've stayed up so long, it feels like I've lived for a million years.' Will spoke into the fabric of Hannibal's shirt. 'Like I've outlived everyone else in the world.'

'Then you and I are the immortals?'

'The left behind, maybe.'

'No, I doubt you would like to live forever. Most who wish for it wouldn't.'

'Except for you.'

'I feel I would be well-suited. Whether I would not regret it…'

'Good thing you won't find out.'

'I would rather know,' Hannibal said. 'Curiosity is never served by fear.'

Will's breath pressed in and out of his body. To speak of living made Will aware of living; of his being trapped, indefinitely breathing, his mind indefinitely working. It was in these moments that the Will of old would confess to Hannibal his consideration of suicide. He had never gone so far as to retrieve the means—though he knew that the shotgun was in his front room at the house in Wolf Trap, and that at the house in Baltimore, knives and scalpels abounded—but felt the idea as a growth in his skull, sometimes painfully throbbing. He gathered himself against Hannibal; and perhaps that was not what he was thinking of, then.

'I don't care,' Will said, 'what you would do to me. I already know. You put a knife in my gut and left me on your kitchen floor. It's no great mystery. … I want to know about Abigail.'

'I will tell you about her life,' Hannibal offered, 'if you will tell me about her death.'

Will heaved himself up. He sat at the edge of the chaise, his feet on the floor, his hands on his knees, and said, 'I can't hold you and talk to you about Abigail.'

'We can agree not to speak of her at all; though I doubt either of us could bear it.'

'Bear it. … You cut her throat,' Will said. His voice was hoarse and caught, as if he felt a phantom of Abigail's wound.

'I had been prepared to forgive you,' Hannibal said.

'Why did you bother?' Will stood. He crossed to the balcony doors and looked out. As he breathed, his shoulders moved quickly; he must have been growing dizzy. 'You would have had to run no matter who you killed or didn't kill. Was it just—common, petty sadism? Like every other God damned killer who thinks he's got a hold of some power? It was beneath you.'

Hannibal had wanted to mourn: not after he had sent them towards their deaths, no, but after he had smelled Freddie Lounds on Will. It felt as though his ribs were cracked open; it felt as if his lungs were knotted shut; it felt as if his living parts had been carved out of their casings. He wanted to drop to the floor and throw his arms around Will's knees and cry, 'My darling, my darling, the darling I have lost—'

Even the pictures on his walls had gone dim, as if the colors had been washed grey. The house in which he lived, in which he brought about his vision, had been emptied of beauty and meaning. The people he loved spat up the love he had fed them. He alone stood unsullied; he alone stood. The rest would not come back to him, though he could have cried across seas for them. Such grief— Which he was not yet rid of—

When would he be rid of it? If he lived forever, he would remember forever what he had lost. And Will stood before the balcony doors, blithely mortal, looking out.

'Come,' Hannibal said. 'Tell me about Abigail.'

Will turned. His face was sallow in the dim light. He had the expression, though he had not earned the right to bear it, of the quietly betrayed. A certain clearness in his eyes spoke of his reaching towards Hannibal. He was too proud to ask to be held again.

'It took her a long time to bleed out,' Will said. 'She couldn't stand up. She looked towards the ceiling like there was something there; like she expected to see you standing over her, leaning down to pick her up and carry her off. Her hair had fallen away from where her ear had been. There was so much blood on her that it looked like she'd been painted, but it was coming from her neck, and the blood was darker there.

'She looked— She looked more like a child than she did when her father cut her throat. I mean she looked like she understood less about the world. She couldn't figure out what had happened. She was wondering what she'd done wrong. Part of her hadn't caught up and thought we were all going away together.

'Then the cops and the paramedics,' Will continued dully, looking to the side as though he were bored by his own reminiscences. 'They went to her first, and I couldn't see her after that, but I think she was dead by then, or just about. Whether she ever knew exactly what had happened, I can't tell you. Maybe by the end she was thinking about happier things. Birdsong in the woods.'

'The great peace at the end of life,' Hannibal said, crossing his hands over his stomach. 'No more, I think, than a doubter's reproduction of heaven. I myself have not felt it.'

'You never really thought you were going to die.'

'There have been times,' Hannibal said. He thought of a certain instance long before the pigs or the swimming pool; before Will or Baltimore; before he was himself. He had been pitiable then. He had known how it felt to lose one's understanding of the world. No great peace had come to him, and though he wished otherwise, he doubted any peace had come to Abigail.

Her mind would have clung to the inside of her body. She would have kept her eyes on what moved around her, the lights and the limbs jerking through puddles of blood. She would have listened to Will's mourning wails; would have scraped her nails along the floor; would perhaps have tugged at the fabric of Will's shirt. She, very much unlike Will, had learned to keep herself embedded in the world around her.

Not a week before that night, she had told Hannibal that her nightmares were easing away. Hannibal told her that his had long since left him. For of course there had been times; though he was older now, and no longer human precisely but something heretofore unknown, and this rare new creature dreamed well.

'I wish she had died the first time,' Will said. 'When I shot Hobbs, I thought the idea was to live, and worry about what that entailed afterward.'

'If you had let her die then, you would have wondered if you could have saved her. I know your tendency; you believe that you could have saved all of them, if you had only known what you learned after you failed. What is the use? Perhaps you mean to light a fire inside of you and smoke out the weakness, never mind the pain; but weakness is a hardy beast, and it persists.'

Tiredly, Hannibal rose from the chaise and straightened his shirt. Will stood still, as if he had been hidden and Hannibal had only just detected him.

'Your fantasy wasn't wrong, entirely,' Hannibal went on. 'I had been teaching her French and Italian. She preferred Italian and wished to go to Napoli. I was pleased with her. She brought me great joy. … She wept when she knew me, but not when I cut off her ear. For that she was quiet, and asked not to be sedated. She was purposeful; her skin was strong as bone. There you have it, Will.'

'Would she have killed me, do you think?'

'I believe so,' Hannibal said. 'If I had asked it of her. I would not have asked.'

'I'd have forgiven her.'

'And she would have desired forgiveness. … I desire many things, Will, but not forgiveness. There I differ from you and her, though we are, in other respects, alike.'

'I don't desire anything,' Will said.

'Alas,' Hannibal said, 'you do.'

Will laughed, harshly and only once; the laugh precipitated a death-rattle of a cough. He did not cover his mouth. When he had finished, he cleared his throat and said, 'What is it I want, Hannibal?'

Hannibal said, 'To come to bed with me, and rest.'

The north wall of Hannibal's bedroom was papered in a rich plum. The remaining three walls were ivory, creating the sensation that the north wall was a not a wall but a dark passageway, possessed of a gravity which drew towards it all the forms in the room. Two ink-wash paintings, hung on either side of the bed, seemed suspended in space. A circle canopy draped heavily towards the bed, which appeared to recede into the darkness of the passageway.

As Hannibal undressed, Will stood before the sofa at the foot of the bed and peered at the paintings on the dark wall. In one, herons perched on branches; in the other, herons flew towards water. Both were expressed in spare, suggestive spills of ink, faded by centuries of sunlight.

'There were herons near the house I bought,' Will said. 'They're still there, I figure. I looked in on them just before I left. The babies were getting big.'

'Herons are graceful in flight,' Hannibal noted, donning his pyjamas. 'And in fishing.'

When they were in bed together—Hannibal propped up at the center of the mass of pillows, Will curled on his side and not quite touching Hannibal—Will craned his neck to peer once more at the paintings. He seemed to search them for a certain detail. Failing to find it, and with his neck likely aching, he nestled his head into a down-stuffed pillow. Hannibal considered speaking to him and then thought better of it. Will had as good as left his body. His eyes were half-open, roving and rapidly blinking; his mouth was parted slightly, red against the charcoal linen.

A hundred nights they had spent like this: Will next to Hannibal but apart from him, floating down a slow, deep stream. Water seemed to spill into Will's body, bubbling and churning beyond translucent skin, passing out of him and returning to the current. Errant leaves, perhaps shed from an upstream grove, caught between his fingers and in the hollow of his collar and in his waving hair. At times he was covered by a sheet of glassy water; at times he emerged, buoyed by the movement of the stream. He was asleep and more than asleep; he was beyond himself.

Hannibal gathered Will up in his arms. Will's heart kicked impudently in his chest; his hair curled into the soft underside of Hannibal's chin.

Will would find neither peace nor forgiveness. He would learn this only after giving himself up. Such were the ways of madness, of love. Now he was sleeping, breathing against Hannibal's neck; and Hannibal would not kill him. Perhaps he would stay. The two of them were just alike: they both believed in suffering.

White light appeared in the slit between the drapes. Not so long afterward came thunder, thumping like hands against the walls. Rustles echoed in the passageway behind the bed; the people Hannibal had loved were coming forward from the shadows. While he slept, they gathered around his bedside, their heads bowed, their hands clasped before them, watching. He had seen them once, in the early morning, as the dawn was just drawing up: he had asked them if it was time, and they had told him, _Not quite yet_.

At dawn Hannibal opened the drapes. Though the street below was slick with rain, the sky was vast and clear, pulling tirelessly towards the horizon. Beneath a band of orange sunrise, the city's roofs congealed into a mist reminiscent of faraway mountains. Hannibal was entered by the feeling of a simpler, kinder past. Nothing in his mind or body—no pain, no grief—obstructed the pale light, the misty roofs, the wet pavement, the imperceptibly rising sun.

He unlatched the windows and let the cool air stir through, intertwining with the scent of fresh linen and the _bois d'orange_ and Will's skin, gone faintly moist with sweat. Will was awake; the robe had fallen from his shoulder, which caught the sunlight as he lifted himself up from beneath the canopy's shadow.

The feeling of the past peeled away from the scene, and there was only sensation. Hannibal was conscious of coming to know something that was entirely new to him. He could have wept for joy. The world was not yet spent—

Will had lain down again. His face was dimmed by the shadow of the canopy; Hannibal's shadow curved over his calves and feet. Between these slats of darkness, slivers of his body shone: the crossing of veins in his inner forearm, the clench of his fingers in the linen, the curve of one thigh over another, the fine hairs all illumined. Birds passed by the window. Winged shadows slipped across his skin; and he rose, as if to follow.

 

* * *

 

_iii. send me to the electric chair_

The balcony in Hannibal's apartment faced east, towards the sun coming up over the horizon. If looking out from one of the windows of the building opposite, Will supposed that someone would see the face of Hannibal's building, faded white lit up bright beaming orange like an electric panel. On that face would be a speck of a man leaning against a balcony's balustrade and smoking, and that speck of a man would be Will Graham.

The watcher would see Will stand for a while on the balcony, rubbing his hands over his arms to keep warm, finishing one cigarette and lighting up another, sometimes squinting down at the precipitous drop. Then they would see the doors behind Will swing outwards. Then Will dropping his half-smoked cigarette over the balustrade and staying where he was, unmoving, until a second man stepped forward to stroke his palm down Will's back.

Would the watcher keep watching after that, Will wondered? Would they not be faintly embarrassed to have seen that intimacy? Or would they think it was pleasant, seeing the touch and the subsequent kiss? Maybe they would be happy to think that people were not all cruel, that people still had tenderness enough to kiss each other like that.

The watcher would not hear Will say to Hannibal, 'I have someone in mind.'

If they read his lips, they would think that he meant he had someone in mind to play the violin at his wedding, or fill the last seat at a dinner party. People always had other people in their minds; that was living. They would not imagine that Will meant someone to kill.

Someone in the future might imagine it, Will thought. If it all went to hell, if there were trials and true crime books enough to fill a newsstand, someone fifty years from now might thumb through an account of Hannibal Lecter's life and envision Will and Hannibal in Paris, newly reunited, making love and making plans. Some enthusiast of the gruesome might track down the address of the apartment and take a picture of themselves on the street below, the balcony just behind their grinning face.

A long-form retrospective in a monthly magazine would include a picture of the building above the caption: _Here Lecter and Graham planned several murders, including that of S— D—, Graham's second victim_. Young people whose parents would disapprove of their reading such a morbid article would press their noses to the page in an attempt to look more closely at the picture, to get a better feel for what a 'site of evil' looked like. They would not know that Will and Hannibal planned S.D.'s murder while standing on the balcony, lit up by the sunrise, their skin going bumpy in the cool air; and while drinking coffee and eating croissants with apricot preserves; and while Hannibal played a transcription of a Beethoven cantata on the piano in the front room; and while they walked together in the Luxembourg Gardens, their faces dampened as the wind scattered the spray of the Carpeaux fountain.

The article would not write of the quiet things Hannibal whispered into Will's ear, or of the shiver of closeness that Will felt upon being whispered to. It would not write of Will walking to the _tabac_ and finding himself nearly crumpling in the street at realizing that this was not some fantasy of future happiness but something he had done and was doing, irrevocably. It would not write of the view of the sunrise from the balcony of Hannibal's apartment, the moistness of the petals of the lilies Hannibal bought, the salt of the sweat that gathered on Will's upper lip as he staggered away from the _tabac_.

Those things belonged to Will. He held them in the secret pockets of his mind. When he died, all those secret pockets would empty out into the void, no more retrievable than a handful of sand tossed into the sea. No one would come close to getting into his head. He would not let them. They would try— By God—

But the mind was fallible and Will forgot things and so even he could not possess the whole of himself. He could not remember all Hannibal had said at breakfast, or exactly which cantata it was that Hannibal had played. That he nearly wept at the sound of it, yes, he remembered that part.

It was not even certain that there would be trials, or articles with photographs of Hannibal's apartment. Hannibal had walked out of the front door of the house of Baltimore like he was leaving for a day's work. Probably thirty years from now he would drop dead on a walk through the land surrounding the house in Provence he would take up when he was tired of the city. He would be buried in a Catholic churchyard and Hannibal Lecter would become a myth, a spirit invoked half-jokingly: 'Hey, don't be rude to your mother. They never caught Hannibal the Cannibal...'

If Will was found to be missing, they would think Hannibal had taken him alive. Will laughed when the thought occurred to him. Yes, he was alive and he was with Hannibal. He was eating _foie de veau_ and black truffle pâté with homemade mustard, listening to Hannibal play the viola da gamba, getting sucked off on the sofa while the breeze blew the light curtains inward from the open windows.

 

* * *

 

Will said at last to Hannibal, 'I'm not accustomed to feeling...fine.'

They were in the kitchen and the midday sun was blinding white on the counter-tops and Hannibal's blue shirt. The two of them had rolled up their shirtsleeves and were shucking a pot of oysters. The air smelled like the sea.

'That you are unaccustomed to pleasure means you feel it all the more deeply. We feel best the things we know least. The natural consequence of this is that repetition breeds boredom.' Hannibal slipped his blade deftly through the hinge of the oyster. 'It was Pater who advocated that in lieu of attempting to repeat past experience, we should simply move from point to brilliant point.'

'You mean you're glad we've moved on from the brilliant point at which we were trying to kill each other.'

'I enjoy discovering how we develop,' Hannibal said, nestling a half-shell into a platter of ice. 'Of course I enjoy it better when the development pleases me personally. The gardener gardens for the pleasure of nursing the plants; but he hardly minds when the flowers bloom.'

'Oh, sure,' Will said, 'but you like getting what you want.'

He took a drink from the glass of white wine he kept on the counter. Half the bottle and a few gin cocktails sloshed inside of him, making him drunk enough that the play of sun over his hands was infinitely entrancing. For a while he stood moving his hands in and out of the light.

He was aware that there were reasons for him to be in pain, but they did not readily occur to him. It was as if they were waiting politely at the door to his waking mind. This absence—the purity of his vision, never mind the drunken blur—was stunning to him, so much so that all he could think was that he was all right, he was all right, it was fine, just fine, he wasn't in hell, he knew now.

Hannibal was happy to have him. Will hadn't seen it before, but he had always had a rotten tendency to make people unhappy. Abigail had said, 'Stop trying to be my father.' Hadn't she? Will could not get hold of her voice. When he thought of her face, her features broadened and narrowed and shifted before his mind's eye. 'Stop trying, stop trying,' he imagined her saying. The words rang strangely in his head, like it was some poor composite of a hundred other voices besides hers.

'Have you abandoned your oysters?' Hannibal asked. 'Would you rather they return to the deep?'

Hearing Hannibal's voice in that moment suggested to Will the thought that Hannibal had stolen Abigail out of Will's mind. Will wanted a cigarette, but Hannibal hated that he smoked. Some piano piece was cascading out from the record player. He was happy here; he was not in pain. Forgetting meant that his mind was whole nowhere and so could not be looked at or taken.

And there were arms around his body. Hannibal was holding him, Hannibal with the strong tan forearms and the crisp blue shirt and nails trimmed neatly and the soft mouth, the soft mouth kissing, pleasing Will, he the father of no one, but encircled in arms like a son.

The man Will was going to kill was a writer for a trashy weekly magazine, one of those that spit up stories on celebrity pregnancies and politicians' extramarital affairs. S. D., forty-eight, with receding black hair and a drooping mouth. He liked cassoulet and movies about war, and had mistranslated sources in order to fashion a more interesting article about Hannibal the Cannibal's last known murders. When Will imagined killing this man, he imagined Hannibal touching his face and looking at him searchingly. The last time Hannibal had done that, Will had shut his mind so as not to know what Hannibal felt for him.

He had believed, once, that there was another life obscured by the enormous obelisk of Hannibal's love. If the love was dismantled, the life would rise up for the taking. But Will had seen beyond the obelisk and found that there was nothing. Towards the sun, now.

Will slipped his hands around Hannibal's shoulders, lacing his fingers behind Hannibal's neck. In the bright light and the sea-scent, Hannibal felt more like an arrangement of light than a person. The notes of the music seemed to cast shadows that filled in his features. He was smiling across at Will in the way that he did when he knew something that tickled him.

'You look well,' Hannibal said, half amused and half chastising, as if Will had insisted he was rotting. 'The regular meals have done you good.'

Something inside Will revolted against what Hannibal said. Not five minutes earlier he had said to himself, It's all right, it's fine. Then Hannibal had said the same, and he nearly convulsed with the desire to shake him, to tell him that he was wrong. He did not look well, there was nothing in the world that could do him good. He had been pulled and pushed so forcefully and from so many opposing angles that he had been torn apart, like a piece of meat by the spit-wet teeth of hounds. When he had hobbled away from those forces of motion he was half-gone and wholly maimed. No one in the world could mold him back to his own shape. This returning was no more than another reshaping, only that it was him who was doing it, and he was doing it to save whatever of himself was left. Who was Hannibal to tell him he looked well? He did not; he looked like he had never been a boy.

But there was no pain. He had felt unhappy, just then, with the impulse to be angry at Hannibal; he could not have felt pain. Hannibal's arms were around him. His fingers were moving through Hannibal's hair. The sunlight through the window-glass was casting patterns on the walls, and there was white wine in a glass on the counter and a pile of oysters still to be shucked and the shucked ones on the platter waiting to be eaten—what pain was this? Nothing either of them had done in the past mattered in the least, now. He could give it up, that weight.

Hannibal was waiting; he was patient and kind, in his way. The first thing he had said to Will was that he had gotten things for lunch and would put out two plates. That was the sort of man he was. He knew that Will would kiss him and so let Will take his time.

Once Will thought of kissing Hannibal he wanted nothing else. He pulled Hannibal in and met him in a long, wet kiss that felt as though they were both urging each other towards something, or away from something. Hannibal had eaten one or two of the oysters and so tasted of brine, salty and mineral. He lightened the kiss till their mouths were meeting just barely and Will had to lean forward to seek out his lips.

When Hannibal let Will part his lips and ease his tongue up against them, a white sheet seemed to pull forward across Will's mind, obscuring everything else: but beneath it, the last little bit of his self was torn apart. He knew it without feeling it. Softness only, warm mouth and grace, hands on his sides, quiet sighing, the sound of the piano, sun through closed eyelids, love and a pulling-closer.

What had he ever hated Hannibal for? Will asked himself and did not answer. He had drunk enough that his mind no longer conversed with itself. Somewhere in him was the reason, but he did not offer it up to himself and he did not go looking for it.

Hannibal was kissing him deeply, touching his waist through his shirt. Will felt such incomprehensible pleasure that he was sure he had gone mad.

'God,' Will muttered, 'God,' because he could not bear this— This not-pain, ornamented by the pull of Hannibal's lips at his lips; then the pull of Hannibal's lips at his neck.

The music had come to a stop. Will became aware of silence, and after that, the sounds that occupied silence: wrinkling of fabric, brushing of skin, clicking of kisses. Their feet on the floor, the street below, the windows faintly rattling. The world kept them tucked away here as if they were its own secret. No one knew where Will had gone; they would not find him.

 

* * *

 

The night before Will was meant to kill the man, Hannibal taught him how to make brioche. In their white shirts, with their sleeves rolled up and their aprons tied, they rose the yeast, mixed it with flour, sugar, salt and eggs, and folded thick pats of butter into the dough. They listened to Lully's music to a Molière play; the woodwinds and trumpets put Will in mind of bright dresses sweeping across marble.

Hannibal was accustomed to that world: kisses on hands and private collections and picture windows with views of the sunlight on lower rooftops. Such strong, sustained beauty that any stumble was apt to shatter the crystal and rip the velvet. Will was in awe of the fortitude Hannibal must have possessed—or whatever quality it was that enabled him to be so ugly in his private chambers and emerge from them triumphant, a bringer of beauty, denied by no one, tearing down no grand scene. Up till the last, Will supposed.

Scraping the sides of the mixing bowl, Hannibal said, 'We leave the dough to rise overnight. In the morning, we bake it.'

Hannibal's hands—Will's too—were bone-white with flour, oddly textured by a clinging sheen of dough. There was dough beneath Will's fingernails. Hannibal kept his fingernails trimmed short. A memory, one Will did not know he had kept, came to the surface: Will and his father in the kitchen of their apartment in Greenville, the cabinets all chipboard and the floor linoleum, Wheel of Fortune on the television, Will breading chicken legs while his dad drank beer and bitched about him doing it wrong.

'You never told me much about your parents,' Will said, crossing to the sink to wash his hands.

Hannibal, turning from the refrigerator, looked at Will as if he were bewildered. Maybe Will should have known better than to think he was, but the furrow in the brow and the quick-searching eyes seemed true enough.

'What sudden curiosity,' Hannibal said. 'I don't know that there's anything to tell. My memories are very faint.'

Will could not imagine Hannibal being a child. He knew what other killers were like: slimy, snotty, stupid little things who wet the bed and killed neighborhood cats and terrorized smaller children. Hannibal was not one of those. Will saw a light-haired, hollow-eyed boy in wool shorts and knee socks, sitting primly in an armchair and reading a medical text. Had he ever fallen and wept? Had anyone nestled him to their breast and sang him an old folk song? If so, had he bitten their hand?

'Am I so old, now,' Hannibal teased, 'that you find it impossible to conceive of my being young and reliant on older, wiser people? I assure you it was so.'

The water from the sink had been pouring over Will's stilled hands for minutes. Clumps of dough clung to the basin before being washed away by the stream. The water was warm and Will did not want to let it off his hands, though his finger-pads were wrinkling.

'I figure it's only fair,' he said. 'You knowing so much about my father.'

The topic had been a favorite of Hannibal's, before. Will got the idea that Hannibal was as much charmed as repulsed by the idea of southern poverty, the rummage sales and thrice-weekly church services and the rides in the back of the pickup. It was funny to him that there were creatures who lived in a state of such unremitting ugliness—but there was pain too, different in nature to the kind Hannibal's people felt, and Hannibal liked that. It had produced Will Graham, at least.

'Another day,' Hannibal said. He joined Will at the sink. 'Do you mind if I wash?'

Will took his hands out of the sink but did not move away. Hannibal's elbow brushed his arm; Hannibal's hip pressed solidly to his. When Hannibal finished washing, he took up a towel and dried himself. Then he lifted Will's hands up by the wrists and, one after another, dried them, pressing the towel into the sensitive crevices between his fingers, rubbing roughly around the nails to clean them, sweeping down the wrists. Not for the first time, Will was taken by the sight of the scars in Hannibal's forearms.

'Something must've hurt you bad,' Will said. 'Back then. When you were young.'

Hannibal chuckled indulgently. 'Are you resorting to the theory that suffering breeds suffering? That's juvenile, Will. I would have liked to think better of you.'

'Neither of us proves it wrong.'

'I was an exceptionally happy child,' Hannibal said, giving Will's hands a final pat with the towel. 'As I am an exceptionally happy man. You seem to have a tendency towards pain; but I believe anyone can overcome his nature.'

'Which you haven't done,' Will said.

'Of course I have,' Hannibal said. 'My human nature.' He gave a sly, conspiratorial wink, then brushed his fingers over the back of Will's hands and let them drop. 'Now we had better rest. We'll eat the brioche as a late breakfast.'

The morning, when it came around, was clear and cool. Upon peeling back the covers to go down the corridor to take a piss, Will felt his skin prickle. The hardwood was cold against his bare feet and he hurried back into bed to find that Hannibal was awake. He may have been awake before Will had left the bed; Will hadn't looked. But Hannibal's body felt hot and pliant, heavy with the aftereffects of a long sleep. He took Will close to him and kissed his jaw. Beneath the eiderdown, their feet tickled each other.

This was how they had been tender when Will hadn't the faintest idea that the man with whom he'd wanted to buy a big, clean house— What was it Will learned? That Hannibal disliked painting seascapes and had been a gymnast and drank tea according to the season.

There were things still to be known. Will had thought, once, that knowing Hannibal was only a matter of walking forward through his acquaintance, entering each chamber of his psychology in turn. Will's troubles were those of knowing too much: looking at someone and seeing the whole of their pain, their cruelty and vengeance and victimhood, all spread before him to be examined. With Hannibal there was no such knowing. He came to understand so during the second case Hannibal had tagged along on, the case of the organ harvester. Jack had said, 'It looks like a Ripper murder,' but it was all wrong. It ended with Hannibal in the back of an ambulance, his jacket off, his hands stuck inside a living man's body. Will stood on the asphalt before the double doors, squinting at the light that came from between them, feeling the way you do when you're wading into the ocean and all of a sudden the sand gives way and you're dropping, trying to tread water, trying not to think about how deep it goes.

The shore was so impossibly far, now, that Will wanted to laugh at how he had felt then. Hannibal had known the whole time what he was. Probably he knew now what Will would discover in years. He had known that Will would come to him.

Will buried his face in Hannibal's shoulder, where he smelled like sweater-wool and sleep. Hannibal stroked his palm up Will's back, letting it come to rest between his shoulder blades. Will did not want to let go, so clung, pressing a thigh between Hannibal's legs, smearing ungainly kisses up Hannibal's neck and jaw, towards his mouth. It felt so—so good—to have that body against his.

Hannibal kissed Will just once, full on the mouth, before peeling away. He pressed a finger to Will's lips and said, 'It's time to put the brioche in the oven.'

Will nipped Hannibal's finger, but acceded. While his cock was still half-stiff beneath his robe, he buttered the pans and filled them with dough.

Only after Hannibal set the timer and took a final, motherly glance into the oven did he look at Will. 'You're falling into old habits,' he chided. 'There are sensations to be had beyond release. You prefer a mechanical process solely; I prefer an organic one, perhaps at times a mystical.'

'You don't want me to get you off?' Will laughed. The sight of Hannibal's hands interlocking under the sink's stream tugged a needy arousal through his chest.

'No,' Hannibal said. He turned off the sink and turned towards Will. 'I doubt you would be present; you wish now to put yourself out of your mind. Go into the bedroom and have a seat at the edge of the bed.'

The edge Will chose faced the wall of eastern windows. The view was glittering white, like the surface of the sea on a sunny day, and Hannibal's face, when he knelt between Will's legs, was a vague, metamorphosing purple, at the edges infringed on by light. Still, Will knew the calmness in Hannibal's eyes as he looked over the swell beneath the fabric of Will's robe, the eager parting of Will's thighs to accommodate him.

The insides of Will's knees pressed to Hannibal's shoulders, and Will felt the movement of Hannibal's body as he parted the front of the robe, took Will's cock in hand and leaned forward to mouth along Will's stomach. He had not dried his hands after rinsing them and the skin of his palm clung damply to Will's shaft. Even such a loose, careless touch—Hannibal was nuzzling his nose along Will's inner thigh—felt finely honed, miserably bright. Will was panting for it. Spit collected in his mouth. He could barely gather up the wits to swallow.

'Was I the last person you had?' Hannibal asked. He sounded like he did not mind about the answer, but his kisses along Will's thighs grew slower as he waited for a response.

'Yes,' Will said. 'The last time I fucked anyone, it was that night, with you.'

'What do you remember about that night? When we were together. Tell me.'

Will's stomach tensed into itself. Arousal squirmed through his cock, which Hannibal studiously avoided.

'That afternoon,' Will said. 'Before you were due to start preparing dinner. We had just come from your office and we were— We wanted each other. We kept looking at each other and thinking about the ways our bodies fit together. In your bedroom the light was dim and it made me think of resting, like an empty church does. We undressed each other, and you— You pulled my head back by my hair and kissed my neck, you licked my pulse, and I remember I shook so hard I shook your hand out of my hair.'

Hannibal was breathing against the head of Will's cock. His fingers were brushing down the base and to Will's balls, softly cupping them, pulling them slightly away from his body before letting them loose and spreading his hand over the expanse of Will's thigh. He grazed his fingertips over the skin so enticingly that all the small hairs there rose as if to greet him.

'You had decided to betray me, by then.'

Fear screamed through Will's body like a wail through a cavern underground. Whatever was in him was trapped, grieving for itself, at once pleading and thinking itself forsaken. He shook with it, and with desire. He leaned back, bracing his hands at the edge of the bed, and groaned. Hannibal wanted him to go on.

'Yes,' Will gasped. 'I had talked to Freddie Lounds that morning. I was going to get you caught. I wasn't going to go away with you, but I kept talking like I wanted to, so you would believe me.'

'And after I kissed your neck?' Hannibal asked. 'What did we do then?'

'You sat me on the edge of your bed,' Will said. 'The bed was still made. The duvet was dark blue. I put my hands in your hair and you told me—'

'Put your hands in my hair,' Hannibal said.

'You told me not to,' Will finished weakly.

'Put your hands in my hair,' Hannibal said, 'and keep them there. I won't tell you not to do it.' He spoke quietly and gently but he was not pretending to be even slightly human.

Will took his shaking hands to Hannibal's hair, which was soft between his fingers and still sleep-mussed, falling over his forehead, obscuring his eyes when he leaned in certain ways. When Will tightened his fingers, pressing his palms to Hannibal's skull, Hannibal bent his head and drew Will's cock between his lips, wetting it with firm, thorough laps before descending down the shaft.

Hannibal's lips were dark and soft. They made Will think of the way Hannibal looked when he ate, though the swell in his cheek where Will's cock pressed to the inside could not have signified anything but cocksucking. Hannibal drew back and Will saw the shine of spit on his lips and teeth, and the flickering of his tongue at the head of Will's cock as he let it slip from his mouth.

'How did I suck your cock, Will?'

Hannibal passed his tongue over his lips and the whole of Will's lower body throbbed in want of relief.

'Slowly,' Will said. He realized that his voice sounded wrung-out and near tears. 'Carefully. You took a while, you made sure I felt it. You— You did all the things I'd told you I liked when we were first together, before I was sick. You— Uh.'

Will felt his hands pulled by the movement of Hannibal's head as he took Will's cock to the root. The tip of it glimpsed the soft, tender folds of Hannibal's throat, and at the same time that a violent pleasure pulsed in Will's gut, he gagged at the thought of what else had been where his cock was. His own throat fluttered around nothing. His hips tilted up to chase more.

'I came on your mouth,' Will said, to keep Hannibal sucking him. He could not bear to be let loose again. 'You had wanted it that way, you, uh, you licked it up and swallowed it. You licked your fingertips. You said, “How do you feel?”'

With a slick sound, Hannibal pulled his mouth from Will's cock. He said, 'Tell me what you said, and then tell me the truth about what you felt.' He did not wait for Will to speak before pressing the head of his cock between his lips and holding it steady as he worked it with his tongue. His fingers played over Will's shaft almost soothingly.

'I told you I felt good. I told you I felt glad to have you again, and to be done with the— The Bureau and the chasing. And I did feel—good. I also felt—I felt scared for myself. I felt scared Jack and Alana and all those people would know how good I felt, and that I wished I could still have you. And I was afraid to die. And I was afraid you would want to keep me.'

'And what'—Hannibal was mouthing the side of Will's shaft—'did you feel when you came to the house, later that night?'

Hannibal enclosed Will's cock in his mouth and gave a cheek-hollowing suck. Pleasure burst into Will like the sea into a sinking ship. He could hardly keep still; he was rocking his hips, clutching the edge of the bed.

In his mind, he floated up Hannibal's front walk. His hair was wet from the rain. He knew— He could not breathe for his knowing. There was a dark mass on the step, quietly shuddering, and he knew that he had done this. If he had gone away—

He and Alana, a while after they got out of the hospital, took a long walk on one of the trails at Bull Run park. She said she should have known, she should have known, she should have known, she should have known. She was stupid, she said, ripping leaves from trees. If only she had known like she should have known. Then they held each other and said that neither of them had been stupid. Neither of them were wrong to have loved him when they did. It felt like healing, and then Alana was committed for shooting at shadows and Will was passed out on his bathroom floor.

The house, when Will entered, smelled like Hannibal; it smelled like it had when he was in love with Hannibal. He knew that the time of being happy in that house was finished. It had been finished long before, but he felt it then.

He was the one who had been betrayed. But God, to fall from Hannibal's graces— And here Hannibal was giving him pleasure, pulling his lips up his cock, slipping back down and humming with satisfaction, consideration. Eyes bright with awareness. Hannibal's mind lived in there, behind that face. Will thought of a well that corpses had been dropped into, and his heartbeat thudded behind his cock. His lungs released and caught. Hannibal's hair was soft between his fingers. Hannibal sucked him and he groaned like he was scared, though he was not scared.

He was just at the crest of coming when Hannibal pulled back. Hannibal rested his palms on Will's thighs and surveyed Will's sweat-glistening skin, his spit-slick cock and his quivering stomach, his bit lip and his half-shut eyes. When Will's body realized that Hannibal had stopped, it went hot with impatience.

'I saw—' Will began.

'No,' Hannibal said. 'I rescind my question. I'll ask you another: do you want me to go on?'

Steadily, Will said, 'Yes.' He was so near to finishing that he could not breathe even though he was breathing. The return of Hannibal's mouth to his cock had him almost convulsing, leaning his head back at the same time that he thrust his hips forward.

Hannibal's tongue was precise and maddening. He did not shy away from Will's shift forward, but leaned into it, letting Will's cock press again into the inside of his cheek. Will could have torn his own skin off in desperation. When Hannibal tilted his head up and looked at Will in the way that said, 'I am almost finished with you; behold your end,' Will only muttered, 'God, uh, God,' meaning Thank God, thank you.

With his hand tugging unrelentingly at Will's shaft, with his lips barely touching Will's head, Hannibal said, 'On second thought. Do tell me what you saw.'

Pleasure burned in Will like hot iron struck through his gut, between his hips. Hannibal was terrible and good and Will fairly shouted his lungs out from his mouth. He saw a long corridor. Hannibal held his hips steady and caught his come in his mouth and on his lips.

'No,' Will gasped, 'I'm not, ah, I'm not—'

He would not say it, he told himself. He would not tell Hannibal. He was not going to say anything. He was not—

'Don't trouble yourself,' Hannibal said. He licked his come-wet lips and swallowed conspicuously, then rose. 'We've finished. And the brioche is ready.'

Somewhere far away, the oven timer chimed. Hannibal left the room. Will could not move; he was untucked and drying, bare. His weight sunk into the bed, his fingers ached from being clenched. He thought nothing. He looked through the window, into the white light, until his eyes were stung purple. Could he blind himself that way, he wondered.

Residual arousal still bubbled through his skin. The feeling would have been nice if it had not made him aware of his body. The scar on his stomach was up to the light, but he liked that part of him, if any. It was what he had earned, or deserved.

At the kitchen table, Hannibal and Will sat across from each other and sliced off the puffy tops of their rolls, making small hollows into which preserves went. Hannibal had made strong, citrusy coffee that Will drank in gulps. The sun was bright in the kitchen, too, and shone in the cutlery and cups and plates.

Hannibal had the laxity of someone who had recently come. Will realized that he probably had, and tried to think of whether Hannibal had at any point seemed discomposed. He could have got himself off afterward, as Will was lying on the bed, but Will did not think he did. It was in response to something Will had done or said. Will searched himself—his imagination more than his memory—and found nothing.

As Will chewed a bite of brioche, he looked across at Hannibal and caught his eye with the intention of asking him just as soon as his mouth was clear. Hannibal looked back at him amused, as if he knew what Will was going to ask and had a mind to indulge him.

'When you imagined me cutting her throat,' Will imagined Hannibal saying, though he did not really say it and Will had not really imagined it. Will had only gone so far as the corridor, that time.

Hannibal sipped his coffee, peering at Will over his cup. Will swallowed his words along with what he had chewed. He wanted to know because he wanted to know Hannibal. Well, there was no such thing. Hannibal's sole sadness was that he would never be known. Each door he opened would open onto another door, each flight of stairs would lead down to another flight. There could be no love, or innocence, or kindness tucked into his core; he did not have a core. He was the longest passage in the world.

Will felt sad for him. Here Will was, with the matter of peace being only a matter of breaking—and Hannibal was opening doors onto doors onto doors.

 

* * *

 

The first part was getting hold of the man. His custom was to leave his office in Gennevilliers between five and six in the evening; in the parking garage of the office building, Will leaned up against the driver's side door of S.D.'s car and waited as his mark came trundling into the space between the cars, his nose glued to his mobile phone.

'Give me the phone,' Will said. He wondered if Hannibal, who waited nearby, heard the Louisiana in his French.

S.D. dropped his phone. The screen cracked against the concrete. Neither of them moved to pick it up.

'I'll give you my wallet,' the man said, making a slow, deliberate movement towards his jacket pocket. He was astigmatic and had poor night vision; he did not know who Will was.

'I don't want it,' Will said. 'Do you know me?'

'No,' the man said. 'I don't think so. I don't recognize you.'

'Ever hear of Hannibal Lecter?' This Will asked in English. He drew out the name: Han-ni-bal-(beat)- _Leck_ -ter.

S.D. was silent, frowning, almost unafraid in his confusion. He knew of Hannibal Lecter, yes. Why should that particular specter be invoked by this garage robber? It was then that Hannibal approached. He was elegant in camel coat and bespoke kid gloves; he adjusted his scarf as he strode forward, close enough for S.D. to make out his face in the darkness.

'Good evening,' Hannibal said, a little tiredly, like a proud maître d' forced to admit an unsavory diner. His French was fluid and warm. 'It is true, according to you, that the monster you call Hannibal Lecter habitually fucks his victims?'

'No—what? No, that isn't the slightest bit— I'll retract it. I assure you—' But his eyes were those of a man who recalled his life and tried to reconcile it with the fact that he knew his death.

A syringe of sedative was capped in Will's jacket pocket. Hannibal had measured the dosage according to S.D.'s height and weight. When Will reached into his pocket, he felt how the glass had been warmed by his body.

'Go on, Will,' Hannibal said. He gave a nod. He was as forgiving of Will's hesitancy as he was when they first slept together and Will confessed it had been since New Orleans.

S.D. was waiting, too. It had not taken him long to accept his death—probably he thought it would show his ex-wife just how wrong she had been to leave him—and now he was almost impatient with his killers. Will saw, though, the slight movement in his eyes as he surveyed his periphery, trying to determine if he had enough room to run. He did not, but he thought he did, so turned tail and began scampering away.

Will lunged forward and brought the man to the ground. He toppled along with him in the process. Two things happened at once: the man's right arm, which he stretched out to catch his fall, snapped audibly, and the syringe in Will's pocket was crushed between his chest and the man's elbow. The glass shattered; the fluid dampened Will's shirt.

'Fuck me,' Will said, clapping a hand over S.D.'s mouth to mute his wails of pain. 'Hannibal. Hannibal. The syringe broke. Come—shh, shh—come here, I need your help.'

He craned to glance over his shoulder and saw Hannibal looking dourly on. For a long second Hannibal seemed to be refusing involvement altogether—it had been like that at the Hobbs', where he had paused for a moment to judge the worth of Abigail's life. Then he moved Will gently out of the way, dragged S.D. up and cinched his arm around his throat. The man's heels kicked ineffectually against the concrete, and he scrabbled, even with his broken arm, at Hannibal's sleeve. Possibly he figured that if he escaped from the clutches of the Chesapeake Ripper, his ex-wife would be impressed enough to want him back. It was better that he died before finding out she would not take him back if he single-handedly apprehended all the killers in the world.

After an interminable struggle—Hannibal was sweating and his hair had fallen over his forehead—S.D. slumped, whereupon Hannibal shuffled laboriously backwards to the car, the body limp in his arms.

'Keys,' he grunted.

Will was on the ground, dazed. He had begun to pick bits of syringe from his pocket before he decided it would be better not to leave more evidence. At Hannibal's command, he heaved himself up and retrieved the car keys from S.D.'s pocket. S.D.'s chest was still moving minutely. Will unlocked the back passenger door and helped Hannibal heave S.D. lengthwise onto the seat.

'I'm sorry,' Will said. 'I was stupid; I let him run. Are we all right?'

'You're unpracticed,' Hannibal said. 'It's perfectly natural. Remind me to tell you a story about one of my first.'

Hannibal no longer had a basement. He had an old factory building in Saint-Denis, set back on the bank of a canal split off from the Seine, obscured from view by a crumbling brick wall. Ivy clung stubbornly to the walls and blackened windows. Walking up the broken pavement that led from the gate to the building, Will took a while to figure out that those faint rectangles of light he saw glowing in the distance were only windows covered over by paint, dirt and ivy. After he found it out, he could not remember what he had seen before.

The operating theatre, which to Will's eyes was impeccably professional, was not quite up to Hannibal's standards. The space had been built in the nineteenth century, for the purpose of manufacturing porcelain; the electrical wiring and the gas piping was old and redundant and had been difficult to divert for Hannibal's purposes. Hannibal took pains to appear to be taking pains to conceal his disappointment. He let slip a little creasing of the eyes, a few well-timed sighs, which seemed to gently implicate Will.

'You would have left it all behind,' Will said, 'if we had gone like we said we would. Are you bothered you didn't get to choose to leave it?'

S.D. lay unconscious, tucked onto a gurney which stood to the side of the operating table. Will stood on the other side of the table, watching Hannibal look through a large refrigerator. Great plumes of cold air embraced Hannibal, then drifted out into the room and dissipated.

'I would have liked to have bade farewell to it in my own time,' Hannibal said, tilting his head to the side as if considering. He wore a surgeon's cloth cap and nitrile gloves. 'There were pictures I would have taken. Special objects, triggers of memory. A memory tied to an object is different to a memory floating loose in the mind.'

'You keep all your memories anyway,' Will said.

'No one loses them, precisely.' Hannibal seemed to have found what he was looking for; he took a small glass bottle from the refrigerator, then moved to a cabinet across the room. 'The process of forgetting is only an erosion of the path that leads to a memory. You may, if you do not know the territory, find yourself unable to navigate back to a particular site; but it is part of the landscape all the same. Keeping objects is one way of placing a marker on the path.'

'That's why killers take trophies,' Will said. 'It's why anyone keeps objects of sentimental value. But you eat your trophies. You take them into yourself and let your body process them, just the same as you take sensation into yourself and let your mind process it. Why bother with the trophies, then? Why do the same thing twice? Why not take something you can use as a marker forever?'

Hannibal turned from the cabinet. Absurdly, Will imagined for a moment that Hannibal was going to lunge at him. Possibly because he knew better, Will did not so much as flinch; he stood numbly inside of his body, looking out. Bearing a neat tray of supplies—Will recognized the antiseptic, the syringe and the intravenous catheter—Hannibal took his place at S.D.'s side and began to work.

Cleaning the back of the man's hand, placing the catheter, Hannibal said, 'You know why. You have known for a long time.' Then he filled the syringe with fluid from the glass bottle and injected it into the catheter.

It occurred to Will that he had never seen Hannibal act in this capacity. He had imagined it vividly, yes, so vividly that when he believed he was the Chesapeake Ripper he thought he had unearthed memories of his own—but that was different. What he had seen in his mind was real. What he saw now seemed like one of those dreams in which a close friend does something strange and your dream self accepts it as natural.

'This is yours,' Hannibal said. 'I extend my assistance because I care for you, and believe my expertise will benefit you. I do not wish for my personal vision to infringe upon yours. If you prefer to do otherwise with him—'

Will did not care about S.D. He did not believe that his life had much worth, if any. Nor did he feel any special enjoyment at having him under his control. The man was like a fly Will would have liked to swat sooner rather than later. Will did not want meat, he did not want to slit the man's throat and pull his tongue from the hole, he did not want to look through a book on flower language to choose blooms for the man's chest cavity.

'What do you want?' Will asked. 'His liver, his kidneys, his lungs?'

'I want nothing from that man,' Hannibal said. 'If you would like the liver, I will take the liver for you.'

All at once, Will was physically exhausted. His legs ached, his arms were sore and there was a bruise forming on his chest where the syringe had broken. The thought of a glass of wine or a gin and tonic made him heartsick. He wanted the beach and some tequila and some wood to whittle, to give him something to do with his nervous hands. He wanted—God help him, but he wanted to have Abigail at his side, her feet in the sand, combing out her wave-tossed, salt-crusted hair. In these moments, travel through time seemed feasible, like he could wish so hard that the force of it would thrust him back into the past. He could scream 'it's done' till he was blue in the face and still not quite believe it.

'Let's wait a while,' he said. 'I was quick with Randall Tier. I'll go slow this time.'

Having set his things straight, Hannibal passed out of the theatre, through the vestibule and into the corridor. The door at the end was the one through which they had entered. Will did not know where the other doors led, so followed Hannibal closely.

'I'm glad to see you working past your limitations,' Hannibal said. 'Shall we have dessert in the meantime?'

In the apartment in Saint-Germain, while S.D. lay blissfully absent, Hannibal and Will ate strawberries with white chocolate and crushed almonds. Hannibal drank a coffee and Will drank a series of Old Fashioneds. He sat at the kitchen table and looked out the window until the individual pricks of city light blurred together and melted into the darkness.

'Would you rather rest?' Hannibal asked.

'Just wanna sit for a while,' Will said.

'Then I'll sit with you,' Hannibal said.

They ate strawberries until the carton was empty. Will, wanting for something to occupy him, began to gnaw on a bar of white chocolate. He had eaten nearly half of it when his stomach began to ache. To quell the feeling, he went to the drinks cabinet, found the crystal decanter of whiskey and fixed himself another Old Fashioned.

'Want one?' he asked Hannibal, jokingly. When he turned from the cabinet to see if Hannibal was smiling, he saw that Hannibal had placed his elbow on the table and his chin in his palm and was looking at Will with dark, low-lidded, sleepy eyes. Of course it was not his real look, but it was a lovelorn look all the same. Hannibal wanted to give Will a lovelorn look. He did not want a drink. Those two things Will knew for certain.

Rather than sit, Will kept his tumbler in hand and stood before one of the kitchen windows, nearly pressing his nose to the glass. The view was all abstract form. So close to the outdoors, he could hear the caterwaul of sirens. Somewhere out there was a man who did not know he was waiting to die. In Will's mind, he was dead spiritually. The matter of actually killing him hung over Will's head like a swarm of insects.

The house had the air of travel. It felt like a transitory space, somewhere Will was passing through on his way to a place where he did not think. Here it was indistinct and ever-shifting, as the space between waking and dreaming. As soon as a thought frightened him, it had gone out of his mind, leaving him blank and afraid of a thousand things he could not hear or see. He had had too much to drink. He wondered at his silhouette reflected in the window, hovering over the impression of the kitchen. That thing in the window was who he was.

'Let's go,' Will said. He set down his cup with a clatter. He took his jacket from where he had draped it over the back of a chair—he had picked the syringe-glass out—and shrugged into it as he moved towards the door.

'You're very drunk,' Hannibal said.

'I feel fine,' Will said, and he did. When he worked his way down the stairs, he thought of nothing but where to put his feet, how not to fall. Drops of water shone on the glass of the landing windows. 'Is it raining?'

Hannibal carried an umbrella. He slowed his stride so that he matched Will, and their feet descended the same steps at the same time.

'It is,' Hannibal said. 'Until four or five in the morning, I predict.'

'Once, back in Virginia, I thought you came for me,' Will said. He skipped the last two steps and landed solidly, feet flat on the ground floor landing. 'I'd left the door open and forgot about it and thought you had opened it.'

'I imagine I would have knocked,' Hannibal said.

'Why didn't you?' Will asked. 'Come, I mean.'

'Why would I have? You preferred to be alone.'

'Maybe,' Will said. He could not remember what he had preferred.

Hannibal opened the door to the courtyard and the cold breeze blew in a flutter of leaves fallen from the single courtyard tree. Yes, rain was falling. The moisture felt delicious as a drink of ice water.

In the courtyard, Will turned his face up to the sky. The moon was somewhere hidden, but airplanes blinked through the dense grey clouds. Spotlights hit up against the clouds' flat undersides. Sirens far away. And someone had left their clothes on the line: fabric limply dangled from a darkened window, stirred sometimes by the wind. In one of the lit windows there was a party. Someone cracked the window open to smoke a cigarette, and a wash of noise—voices, glasses clinking, jazz—issued out alongside the smoke. None of those people would know. Will would not cry out to the woman smoking the cigarette, 'Help me, take me away from here.'

Hannibal waited in the corridor which led to the entrance to the street. The entrance was barred by a double gate made of intricate wrought iron; street light spilled between the flourishes of the iron and lit Hannibal with glowing arabesques.

As Will went towards it, the corridor darkened. Then he was in another corridor. The scent of fallen leaves and cigarette smoke gave way to that of damp overcoats, damp hair. A whiff of disinfectant, latex. Hannibal had shed his overcoat and scarf and kid gloves; he stood before the entrance to the vestibule which led into the operating theatre.

'I'll cut his throat,' Will said. 'I'll get him hung upside-down, make sure he bleeds out quick.'

Hannibal looked at Will out of the corner of his eye. The dim fluorescent cast pools of shadow beneath his brow. Out of the shadows gleamed the specks of reflection which indicated eyeballs. These specks glided from the centers of the pools to the outer edges, and that was how Will could tell Hannibal looked at him out of the corner of his eye. Hours before, Hannibal had looked at Will with his eyes low-lidded.

Together they worked efficiently: they bound S.D.'s hands and ankles with cable ties—ligature marks, Will thought—and used a system of ropes and pulleys to hoist him up by his feet. He swung over a drainage trough. Will saw pigs hung on hooks, their rubbery white skin split open to show the meat and the bones. The pigs were dragged through the air by a conveyor, which brought before Will an endless procession of them. Pigs growing larger and finer in detail, then passing out of his view.

Behind the pigs Will saw glimpses of S.D. He was unconscious but still breathing: his naked, hair-streaked belly was moving. The fat in his face drooped towards the ground, making him look almost like he was smiling. Blood pooled in his upper body; his legs were white. The life was leaving him from feet to head.

The weapon was a thick, gleaming blade with a tough leather handle that warmed in the clutch of Will's palm, when he was able to clutch it. His hands seemed to be working at half-strength. Something in his center, like an internal level, was off-kilter, skewing everything in him from his gait—he leaned to the side and forward—to his grip. His eyelids kept closing without his willing it. He tried to lift the knife high enough to get the man's throat and found his elbow gave out and let his hand down. Nausea thickened in his throat.

'I don't feel too good,' he told Hannibal. 'I need'—he smelled the pigs, their coppery blood, and the Betadine he and Hannibal had washed with before entering the theatre—'some fresh air, I need to go out.'

Out through the vestibule, into the corridor. He leaned against the wall and slid towards the floor. He would have to wash up again, going back. That was a long way away from him now.

Inside him was the thrum and slap of a washtub bass. Low portentous humming. Yellow grasses swaying; shutters smacking peeling wood. Circling wasps and swaying lamps. A bright line glittering in motion.

The knife was in his hands. It was dark where he was, and he was on the ground, in the grass. He struggled to lift himself. The knife had been given to him for a reason, he knew. The spirit in the darkness favored him and had given him this weapon. He had enacted one of the rites of the spirit without knowing he was doing so; its customs remained inconceivable to him. But because its veil shielded him, Will moved forward, away from the swaying lamps and the dead grasses.

The humming faded till there was silence enough to hear his spit churn in his mouth, his stomach gurgle in his chest. The motion of the noiseless wind told him that he was passing through a channel, and the channel was narrowing. Every now and then the thud of the silence bled into the thud of the washtub bass. It sounded like he was passing by small caverns of music—celebration, but joyless—so far removed from him that to seek their entrances would be impossible. Only shades lived in those places. They would not see him, and he would not see them.

The channel was narrowing still. He bent his head, then stooped, then dropped to his knees and began to crawl. The ground was moist against his hands—warmly moist and yielding. The knife in his hand made no sound as it dragged along.

A scent issued from somewhere ahead of him: dried herbs and honey, raw milk, citrus, so clean and sweet that he salivated, his jaw hanging down, his mouth dripping. He followed—the spirit was bidding him, and so was his desire. The channel pressed him onto his stomach. His arms extended in front of him, scraping the damp ground, dragging his body forward. The sweet scent grew as thick as liquid. Drawing air was like breathing underwater. His lungs felt sodden and heavy.

His hands budged up against something soft. It felt of skin, smooth as a child's, damp as if just out of a bath. With the hand that did not hold the knife, Will patted the thing to get a feel for its shape. His first instinct had said that it was a body, but his hands found no usual features, no head or hand or arm or leg. Beneath the skin, he detected swells of bone and cartilage, loose, creating no obvious form.

The thing was alive—it moved against his touch as if trying to curl into it. He stroked his hand along its skin rhythmically, lulling. It seemed to be in pain and he wanted to soothe it to sleep.

'Will,' a voice said, high and thin, seeming to come from a mouth of broken teeth. Snuffling noises followed; it was those Will knew as Abigail's.

'Hi,' Will said. 'Didn't know I'd find you here.'

'You always do,' Abigail said. The flesh rippled beneath Will's palm; he held steady. 'You saw me when you were in the hospital.'

'Yeah,' Will said. 'When you came to visit me.'

'No,' she said, 'you brought me out. He and you always do.'

'Would you rather I didn't?'

Silence; the thing Will held was still. He could feel its little breaths.

'You were both good to me,' she said. 'I don't hate you for what you did.' She sounded like she was reciting some half-remembered prayer. The words had the odd cadence of speech produced more by muscle memory than by the active mind. There was no truth in it: she was saying it as a plea. She was asking not to be loved any longer.

'It's okay,' Will said. 'You can tell me the truth.'

'You won't want it where you're going,' she said. 'It's better you don't have it. Do something for me.'

'Sure. Sure. Anything.'

'Don't kill the man he wants you to.'

'It's mine,' Will said. 'I chose it.'

'I did what he told me,' she said. There was nothing else: Will knew: she had done what Hannibal told her, and he had not loved her afterward, if ever.

Light flashed into the channel. Will saw only white; then the violet as the light went out. The ground was tilting, rolling him against the wall. The flesh he had held jerked out of his reach. A soft steady roar kicked up and grew louder. The light slanted in from a crack in the wall, illuminating something red before fading. Will tumbled forward; the roaring grew louder. The channel was flooding and he knew the roaring was that of water. The knife had fallen from his hands and he patted the ground in search of it. The slant of light returned, pulsing.

Out of the light, hands formed and reached towards Will. They were warm and broad, cupping his cheeks, holding his head up. His head was a massive weight that he wanted to let fall to his chest. He put his palms to the wall and instead felt finely-woven cotton wrinkling over solid flesh.

'Leave me alone,' Will muttered. His legs bent uncomfortably beneath him; the floor was hard concrete. 'I'm fine, I'm fine. I fell asleep for a second. Let me up.'

The hands helped him up. They did so because they were Hannibal's hands. The corridor outside of the operating theatre came into focus, then blurred again. Will's body felt weak and he wanted a bed, but kept himself standing out of sheer contrariness. Hannibal expected him to stumble.

'Is the man dead?' Will asked.

'No,' Hannibal said. 'I've kept him waiting for you in the theatre.'

'Strung up still?'

'As you left him.'

'Where's my knife?' Will turned away and broke from Hannibal's grasp. For a moment he had the feeling that he had left the knife in the dream. Thinking of the dream made his mind lean back into it—he saw the darkness, smelled the sweet scent—and he clutched Hannibal's arm to keep hold of the corridor.

With his free arm, Hannibal reached to place a soothing palm over the back of Will's hand. The touch made Will feel like how he was when he was sick. Always sweating and crying, drawing clocks on every piece of paper he could get his hands on, begging for Hannibal to tell him what was real. Had it been like that for Abigail, too? Did the sight of a strobe make her choke on her own breath? Did Hannibal hold her face in his hands, stroke over the place where her ear had been and tell her that she was safe?

The knife, Will saw, was on the floor by his feet. He knelt to pick it up, swayed as he rose and braced himself with a palm to the wall, which was grimy and hard, nothing like that of the channel.

If he asked to go home—the apartment was home—Hannibal would let him. Hannibal would say, 'You've exhausted yourself,' and take him home and feed him a cup of warm milk. Maybe suck him off after he was washed and put to bed. In the morning Hannibal would set out pastries and grapefruit and American coffee, and at the breakfast table say, 'Will you return to the theatre today?'

Hannibal possessed infinite qualities. His patience with Will was not only everlasting but unflagging. In another life, he could have been an extraordinarily kind, good man. Will did not know if he would have loved him then. Will loved Hannibal in this life, and in this life Hannibal would wait forever for Will to come to him.

If Will killed the man now, they would prepare and place the body. Then Hannibal would say, 'You've tired yourself,' and he would take him home, feed him warm milk and wash him and put him to bed, and in the morning there would be the pastries and the grapefruit—but contentment, in that version. Across the city, cops would try to make sense of the gutter journalist who was found leaning back in his chair, hands limp over the keyboard of his work computer, an open document flashing: Je me rétracte.

His car would be parked in his usual spot, his briefcase unpacked as if he had come in early for a day's work. The man had no lack of enemies, and suspects would pile up by the basketful. In a few months or a year the case would cool off, then go cold entirely, relegated by the public consciousness to lists of 'Twenty Spookiest Unsolved Crimes', the psychotic speculation of occult experts. An odd duck would maintain that the killing was ordered by an international drug lord to whom S.D. was in debt. A more popular theory would hold that S.D. had been bumped off by a double-dealing politician he had been threatening to expose. It was doubtful that anyone would think of the FBI special investigator who had been too thick to know the killer he was searching for was the man in his bed.

Then there would be another body, and another. Hannibal would praise Will's increasing ingenuity. Will would paint in bolder strokes. They would work under false identities, Hannibal as a composer or museum director, Will as—a forensic technician, he thought tentatively, or an academic. No, Hannibal would discourage Will from repeating himself: point to brilliant point, he said. Hannibal must have torn through so many selves already.

Whether themselves or other selves, they would sleep in the same bed. They would drink out of each other's coffee cups. Will would wake late Sunday mornings to hear Hannibal fiddling on the clavichord. … No, no— Something in him thought not. He seemed to have intruded on the vision of someone else's future. Hannibal would kill him; he would eat his heart.

Will and Hannibal scrubbed down and returned to the theatre. The man had hung for so long that he had stopped swaying.

Well, Will thought, as he approached the hanging man. Well, goodbye, Will Graham. If he took Hannibal's new name, he considered, he would be Will Fell. That was as good a name as any for what he would become. The goodbye to the old felt superfluous; it was as if he had turned up for a funeral to find that grass had grown over the grave. Will Graham had left long ago.

No feeling moved in him; the time for that was gone. He had dreamed so violently, had stumbled and struggled, because he had believed there was a choice he had to make. But there was that funny thing about falling.

Will stood behind his victim and with one hand held his lolling head steady. With the other hand, he stabbed the blade into his neck deep enough to split open the carotid artery. After he had made sure of it, he withdrew. Blood beaded on the blade and began to drip off. Also it came from the wound in sprays that pulsed along with the man's slowing heart. Soon S.D. was dead and the last of his blood tinkled into the trough. There was a time when Will would have done this and imagined he was killing Hannibal. Not any longer.

Space reasserted itself. Parts of the scene before him—the gleaming metal trays, the rows of blades and clamps; the lines of grout between the tiles—fought for his attention, declaring themselves features of his world. They told him that he was a part of this, too; he was an object like any other.

He set down the blade on the tray that had been prepared for it—that last haven of bloodiness before Hannibal scrubbed it clean. The handle would cool; Will's fingerprints would wash off. It bothered Will, the thought of being wiped away from his crime like a house from the person who had grown up in it. No wonder Hannibal couldn't bear it. All those pieces of his own soul bagged up by the Bureau, shuffled away to morgues, picked apart and slapped onto the figment of the Chesapeake Ripper. With each new body, a door opened—

If Will was going to open a door into himself, he wanted the door to open into himself. He did not want to be an unsub, an empty space with the veil of a lurid nickname draped over it. He hated when people tried to get at him. It was always grabbing at shadows, shining a flashlight into deep woods, spinning a fisherman's yarn. For a long time he had preferred not to be known at all. He had been afraid of human eyes as some are afraid of the eyes of cameras. They would steal some shard of him, he thought, and use it to construct something different, like old gods making people out of stones. Now he dared the universe to let him be known.

'Don't clean the knife,' Will said. He tucked it into its sheath still spotted red with S.D.'s blood, its handle shimmering with the oil of his fingers.

Across the theatre, Hannibal stood watching. In his reticent way, he looked like he had seen someone he loved return from a war they had not been expected to survive. There was real joy in the wrinkle of his eyes, the pull of his lips, but also a bewilderment at what he was meant to do with this, this half-ghost returned.

Where did Hannibal think Will had returned from? Will had always been there; Hannibal had always seen him.

Will told him, 'I was always the way I am. I would have come around to this in my own time.'

'I doubt it,' Hannibal said, 'but they don't bear much consideration, those “would haves”. What would have happened has happened. I would rather ask what will happen next.'

'What do you think will happen?' Will asked. 'It's your turn to answer questions, now.'

'We will go home together,' Hannibal said, 'and wash ourselves and rest.'

It was a dodge: Hannibal could not tell Will whether there would be another body, whether the next body would be his body, whether Will would stay, whether Will would run. There was no knowing from either end. He and Hannibal might well have lived in different dimensions, each interacting with a vision of the other, speaking languages similar enough to trick them into thinking they understood each other.

They had been so close. They had been inside each other's bodies. Perhaps, when they were a good deal younger, they had managed to touch each other's minds. Not now: Will was falling into himself. He was deeper than he had ever been before. Hannibal peered into him and saw only as far as the bath and the bed.

This wasn't supposed to happen, Will wanted to protest. He had wanted to find the end of Hannibal; he had wanted Hannibal to find the end of him. He had wanted to hold Hannibal, and for Hannibal to hold him. Will had kept himself from it because he had had some ideas about goodness; but he had known, all the while he was being good, that if he stepped across the threshold he would have it. Well, now he was not good, now he had crossed the threshold—now he heard no voice in his head but his own. There was something he had not got; a thread he had let go of.

Will washed his hands at the white sink in the corner of the theatre. He mumbled an old torch song as he worked. It had been a while since he had had a drink and his head was beginning to clear. Would the rain still be falling when he got outside? He wanted to have a cigarette, never mind that Hannibal did not like him to smoke. The desire lit his lungs and burned like the tar itself.

Just before the two of them passed through the gate to the street, Hannibal touched his hand to Will's shoulder, then slipped his palm down his back. He had switched his nitrile gloves for the kid gloves and Will could feel the slight stiffness of the leather through the fabric of his shirt. The tips of Hannibal's fingers wrinkled the fabric, but did not press firmly enough to come up against Will's body. Soon enough Hannibal was reaching into his pocket for the keys to S.D.'s car, and Will was nudging open the gate.

The last of the night, loath to let loose, was clinging to the clutter of apartment blocks which marked out the horizon. Slight mist moistened the air and Will breathed it in deeply. The view of the canal and the farther buildings seemed open beyond compare. There were doves settled in the patches of grass which bordered the brick wall; they lifted up only to settle down again.

An hour later, Hannibal and Will departed from the office building in Gennevilliers. The sun was hours from rising—the clock in Hannibal's car read 5:48—and the sky was black, starless, like a cover of paint slicked over whatever atmosphere spread out behind it. The streets were empty as a model town. The appearance of a newsstand rolling up its shutters was strange to Will for a reason he could not quite identify. Of course the world went on; what else was it meant to do?

It occurred to him that it wasn't the world that was wrong. What right had he to ride along in the passenger seat, looking out at newsstands opening, when he had killed a man not very long ago? He supposed he had expected to find that everything was differently colored because he saw it through a killer's eyes. When he looked into the minds of the ones he caught, the sky moved faster and spotlights lit him and the people were not people but the grotesques of a living nightmare. Those minds felt like oubliettes crushing slowly in on him. Now he was in his own mind and it felt unlike anything else. Hobbs had told him to see, Hannibal had told him to see—all those hundreds of sickly minds screaming for him to put a blade into a man's throat and see.

The lights at the empty intersections cycled through their colors. The asphalt gleamed with the rain it had soaked up. Storefronts sunk gloomily into the shadows; late-night food stands glared out. A few well-groomed little lapdogs wagged down the pavement in search of a tree or a lamppost, their owners indicated by the glow of a cigarette. The tables and chairs of the outdoor cafes stood stacked beneath the awnings, lashed together, sodden with the rain. In front of restaurants, trucks unloaded pallets of fresh meat and fish. Every now and then the headlamps of a passing car pierced through the windshield, then quickly abated.

Hannibal looked tired. He drove smoothly, peering out of the side windows like a father looking in on his sleeping children. Not that Will knew what that looked like exactly, but he could imagine. Hannibal was calm; he did not feel even a breath of a threat. Paris had been his home before, Will knew, after he was taken in by his aunt and uncle. He had studied medicine here. Probably, though he had never told Will about it, he had made his first kills here.

Point to brilliant point— God, no. Hannibal saw the life he had made for himself swallowed up by a sinkhole and he came running to a place of warmth and safety. He was a sentimentalist. He would never let go of the things he loved.

'What was your first like?' Will watched the orange lamplight pass over his body. 'You said you would tell me a story about it.'

'One of my first,' Hannibal said quietly. 'A pathologist I shadowed while I was a medical student—the first time, here in Paris. He caught me in the morgue after I was due to have left and I struck his head with the door of a drawer. Pure impulse. After he was dead, I cleaned the room and performed an autopsy on him; then he went into an empty drawer. I couldn't conceal that it had been a fumble, and that disappointed me. I thought then that I had risen very much above impulse. I had beauty in my mind, but lacked control; the beauty, I felt, was always lost somewhere between my mind and my hands. But the fault was never in my body.'

'No,' Will said, 'I want to hear about your first, the first. It was here, wasn't it?'

'What clever speculation, Will. I would be happy to hear what you've imagined for me.'

'I haven't imagined anything,' Will said.

It was true. His mind's eye had gone blind. He saw the lightening sky, the road unfurling. Hannibal's gloves on the wheel, the jut of his top lip, the living glint of his eye flicking to the side. Hannibal was remembering. Maybe someday he would tell Will the story.

 

* * *

 

The apartment was stiflingly still. The drapes hung over the windows; the lights glowed dimly, as if they had known no one was home and so decided to rest. There was a sense of suffocated motion, like a clock with its hands held still, except that the ormolu clock on the mantel was ticking.

Will drank three or four fingers of whiskey, then ran a bath and sat in it for what must have been an hour. No washing or splashing or stirring of fingers through the bath; there was numb, thoughtless sitting. He moved so little that his knees, where they poked up from the water, dried completely. The only motion he perceived was that of the water lapping against his stomach, creating a sort of high-tide mark that glistened when the current receded. He did not know what Hannibal was doing; he heard no rustling beyond the locked door, though likely would not have heard a foghorn.

On the bed, Hannibal had set out two pairs of silk pyjamas, both his own. Coming in from his bath, Will ran his fingers over the silk and thought of how cool and pleasant it would feel on his body. Then he donned his shorts and shirt and tucked himself into bed. No bed had ever felt softer, no linen had ever felt smoother. Even then Will felt a certain restlessness. He was keenly aware, as he had been the first time he slept at the Baltimore house, that this was a space which belonged to someone else. It was not and would never be his own.

He woke to pale grey light from the windows—the drapes had been drawn open—and Hannibal beside him, not quite touching but close enough for his heat to fill the space between them. Will was on his side, his arms crossed over his chest, his legs drawn up; he faced away from Hannibal.

'I'm awake,' Will mumbled.

Clots of grey moved sluggishly through the sky. Thin raindrops spotted the window-glass. Looking at the cold sky made Will yearn for closeness; he turned over and saw Hannibal facing him, his hair untidy and his face relaxed. Will was glad to know Hannibal felt so tender as to offer this expression. If he put his glasses on, Will would see the lines of strain which told of the falseness, but Hannibal was blurry now and Will was pleased with him. He put his hand to Hannibal's cheek, felt the burgeoning stubble, and drew him in to kiss.

The rest of the morning seemed to follow from that kiss. Time did not reach out its million hands; it moved like the dumb mind wished it did. After the first came several other kisses: some hotter, some slower, some gentler or more searching or less hurried. Their bodies twined together till they knew they were both hard. They made a game of rubbing against each other—sliding a thigh against the groin or slipping a hand up the shirt—and then retreating, diverting kisses to the jaw or shoulder, letting the bedsheets crumple up between their bodies. Piece by piece, they removed each other's clothing. Will got up on top of Hannibal, held Hannibal's wrists in his hands, split his legs over Hannibal's lap and leaned down to kiss him. Each pull of lips enacted a full-body shift which rocked their clothed cocks against each other. Later Hannibal pinned Will beneath him and kissed his neck till Will was squirming up against his weight, at once demanding and unable to bear the itch.

Before Will quite knew they had moved on from teasing, Hannibal had pulled down the front of Will's shorts and was cupping his cock, handling it a little roughly, giving Will the definite pleasure that had not come with half-measure brushes of skin. Will pressed his lips shut to soften his groan. After that came nothing but a shift of the mattress; Hannibal rolled to the side and reached to the nightstand, drawing out a little bottle of lube and coating his palm in it. His touch, when it returned, was smooth and slick, just tight enough around the shaft, just firm enough when rubbing at the head. He made Will grunt with a flick across the slit; he made Will sigh with a pattern of slow pulls.

Hannibal gave just enough to afford unadulterated pleasure—the sort of spark that made Will shake like he was in the throes of a fever. It was like a fever, that feeling: it made Will want to beg for it to be out of him. If he wanted to, Hannibal could give Will the sort of low pleasure that made him want to stay in it forever. But Hannibal never did give that sort, not to Will. He wanted to see Will bear the unbearable.

When Will wriggled out of Hannibal's grasp, meaning to lower himself to Hannibal's cock, he felt himself stopped by an arm around the waist. Hannibal held him close.

Stroking Will's fringe back from his forehead, Hannibal said, 'I won't let you beg off feeling pleasure.'

'I owe you one,' Will objected.

'Then you will owe me another, after this. You were never one to let your debts go unpaid.'

Space seemed to stretch to put distance between them. Hannibal held Will as close as he had ever done and Will felt miles away from him. The brush of Hannibal's fingers across his lips jolted Will back into place. Will's cock was pressed to Hannibal's thigh, caught in the humidity of skin close beneath linen. Hannibal looked at Will in the way that made Will feel like an ill-behaved child, embarrassed at his transgressions and chafing at the bit. Slowly, consciously, while keeping his eyes on Hannibal's, Will began to grind against Hannibal's thigh, smearing wetness across the skin.

Hannibal could not bear watching Will take something for himself, not when he chose to satisfy himself rather than take what Hannibal gave him. So Will felt a mild tingle of relief at rubbing himself off. If Hannibal took Will by the waist and thrust him back into the mattress and let his thigh press down between Will's legs, Will would tip his head back into the pillow and choke out a low noise, and that would be real pleasure.

'That's a little better,' Will grunted.

Where Will was lean, Hannibal was broad-framed and well filled out. His weight on top of Will's was a hair away from crushing; he could have chosen to hold himself up, but chose otherwise. Will felt his breath go shallow at the same time that heat pooled in his cock and stomach and thighs. If Hannibal wanted to keep him pinned, make him come between their bodies, he could. Hannibal's breath came full and measured against Will's face, fluttering Will's hair. Will nearly went cross-eyed trying to look at him. This close, Will's vision was sharp: he saw clearly the bob of Hannibal's throat, the twitch of his lips, the opaque smile.

The air, when Hannibal eased off of him, was cool enough to give Will goosebumps. The top sheet had been pushed back to the foot of the bed. Will's cock was red and gleaming, stiff between his parted legs. He glimpsed it only for a second before Hannibal, with a bedside-manner murmur of 'Here we are,' put his hand to his side and nudged him onto his stomach. At the press of Hannibal's palm, Will's body went limp and gave way. His muscles loosened so thoroughly that he felt incapacitated, unable to lift himself, condemned to lying bare and offered up. His thoughts sloughed off and left only the echo of his dull, sonorous moan.

'Are you comfortable, Will?' Hannibal slid a pillow beneath Will's hips. 'I plan to keep you here.'

Cushioning his head in his crossed arms, breathing into the slight space between his face and the bed, Will muttered, 'I bet you do.'

Will knew what Hannibal was doing. They had done this when Will was sick, when he could not keep lucid enough to jack Hannibal off or stay up on his hands and knees. They had done it before, too, in the very beginning, when all Will remembered about sex was the one-month boyfriends who were endeared by Will's modesty only insofar as they could break it. Hannibal, when Will told him, began to play the selfless lover: he would put Will on his stomach and open him up with his fingers, adjusting speed and angle and depth as if he were trying to pull a particular sound from a rare, delicate instrument. By the time Will was very sick, Hannibal could work him flawlessly. He supposed Hannibal did it then to make him feel safe. He remembered being on his stomach, Hannibal's fingers in him, feeling ridiculous pleasure; his mind was screaming for him to run from it and he was whimpering, 'Oh, that feels good, it feels good,' not knowing why he knew it ought not to have felt good.

Will felt calm now. He was going to let Hannibal give him pleasure because he wanted to be given pleasure. This was a debt Hannibal owed Will, who did not always pay his debts but always took what was due to him.

Hannibal kept a palm at the small of Will's back as he rubbed two wet fingers over and around Will's hole. Will heard the torn-up scraps of his own breath echoing against the linen. Hannibal always made this part the slowest: the careful feeling-out of the hidden things, the ratcheting-up of need. Before Will knew better, and sometimes after, he would beg for more. 'Please,' he would say, 'just put them in, I can take it, I want it.' It was because Will could take it, because Will wanted it, that Hannibal refrained. It had been a nasty shock when Will realized—before he had guessed about the Chesapeake Ripper—that Hannibal did those things because he got off on tricking people into thinking pain was a gift he gave benevolently.

The fingers slipped, then, down to the stretch of skin between Will's hole and his balls. Hannibal pressed his fingers flat, working over the skin, massaging it until Will felt pleasure lash sharply inside him. Then Hannibal stroked so softly that Will shivered at the lightness. If Will lay quiet and unresponsive for a little while longer, Hannibal would begin to finger him. Will bit his lip, held his breath and thought about the weave of the linen, and Hannibal rubbed another lash into him. Denying the feeling sharpened it: Will saw it in his body like a throb of white light, making all the red innards around it glow.

Hannibal went up again, to make sure of the slickness of Will's hole. Will knew, maybe from the shift of the mattress, maybe from the grip of Hannibal's palm on his back, that Hannibal was going to do it then. The air was thick with waiting; Will's face was hot and moist with sweat. The slow slide of Hannibal's first two fingers into the clutch of Will's hole felt unreal, like a premonition. But there would be no more anticipation, not of that kind. Hannibal had failed to make Will wail with not-having, so had given up and gone on to letting him have it.

When Hannibal worked his fingers in and out, he went slowly, hoping to make Will beg to be fucked harder. Will said, 'Yeah, nice and slow, just like that,' whereupon Hannibal gave a rough, deep thrust up to the last knuckle, crushing his hand against the skin beneath Will's hole. Will rocked back, shifting Hannibal's fingers inside of him.

'Spread your legs wider,' Hannibal said.

The crinkling of the pillow was awfully loud. Will felt his cock dripping precome; when he shifted his legs apart he felt the spot he had left on the pillow. He imagined Hannibal sleeping in sex-soiled linen, pressing his cheek against the pillow, smelling Will and getting hard from it. He would think of the way Will looked on his stomach, legs spread, fingers inside him; his face buried in his arms, hidden, reminding Hannibal of how they kept secrets.

Hannibal was going in for the kill: he soothed his hand over Will's hip and he crooked down the fingers that were inside Will, at a certain spot rubbing the tips insistently. A deep pulse of pleasure entered Will. He pressed his face down, swallowed and let loose a breath. It had been since—God, since the time Will and Hannibal were only an unstable agent and his saintly partner-cum-secret-psychiatrist. There had been such a row over their revealing themselves: What self-respecting psychiatrist would—? Though they lied together about transferring Will to another doctor before they were involved. Will had been mostly miserable but sometimes held Hannibal and thought, 'How did it happen to me, this happiness? How could I have fallen into this?'

Oh, God help him, Hannibal stroked his fingers back and forth. Bile rose in Will's throat and he curled his toes, breathing in soft hitches, trying to rock his hips just right. He felt bisected: part of him had never felt so good—and he had never, never; not like this—and part of him had gone numb trying to strangle a realization.

Hannibal made him feel this. It was Hannibal's fingers that tore him up; Hannibal's hand on his hip that worked as a counterweight, stable and comforting, holding him still as he tried to squirm away from such— Such heat: Will shook, sweated. His face twitched. He shut his eyes and thought nothing but _Let me have you_.

Then light crept in. Will throbbed bodily and Hannibal was holding on to him yet. Hannibal was begging him: _Stay. Stay here. Look at what I can do to you. I know you; I know you; I could not do this to you if I did not know you. You are known. You are known nowhere but here. I want to keep you._

Will tried to keep himself—keep himself from coming. His hold slipped for a moment and orgasm hooked him from the inside. His legs spasmed and his teeth ground. His cock pulsed helplessly against the pillow. It felt like someone dragged a candle-flame across his skin: over the arches of his feet, the insides of his elbows, the back of his neck, all the tender places.

There was a moment of darkness; he was closing his eyes, afraid that it was Hannibal who had ripped through him, who had put on his skin. When he had finished entirely, he came back to himself and felt that he was whole. Hannibal's fingers were still inside him. That was what Hannibal did to please him. He lay very still and Hannibal retracted his fingers. The hand at his hip stayed for a moment, burning.

'Better get up,' Will mumbled finally. He turned himself onto his back. His come was smeared across his cock and stomach, but Hannibal, half-lying near the foot of the bed, looked at his face first. After Hannibal had come to some inward conclusion he looked down at Will's body like a lover.

'Sleep if you like,' Hannibal said. 'It's very early yet. I doubt you slept more than an hour.'

'Come here,' Will said, pulling the pillow out from under him and tossing it to the side. He beckoned with his finger. 'I bet you want to call in your debts sometime when you think it'll do something for you. … I want you to get off now. I want to be in the black for a while.'

'I won't deny you,' Hannibal said, and maybe he knew then.

'Lay flat on your back,' Will said.

When Hannibal had crawled up the bed and lain with his head against a clean pillow, Will crawled over him on hands and knees and put his palms on either side of Hannibal. This way, their faces were nearly close as kissing: Will saw, even without his glasses, the supreme stillness and opacity of Hannibal's face.

Will said then, 'Get yourself off with your hands. Eyes open. Eyes on me.'

For a flicker, Hannibal looked down. Something in his lip twitched; something in his cheek twitched. Then he swept his tongue over the crease of his lips and looked at Will like he was hot for it. That was what Will had wanted to see: the tilting of the mask. Hannibal's features were fixed and impassive, permanent, sculpted in cypress and painted. His expressions were the play of light and shadow as the mask moved. He could turn the mask well; he had shown deep grief (I'm sorry, Abigail) and deep joy (Will, Will, you're here now). Still he was slanted towards the uncanny. Will got the feeling that if he kissed Hannibal too roughly, he might tip the mask askew and show whatever flat, featureless skin was beneath.

As in a call-and-response, something else in him yelped: But you care for this thing, you care for this sad dead thing.

Hannibal's head pressed back against the pillow, rubbing against the linen, sinking into the down, as he pulled at himself. Sweat dampened his upper lip. A flush darkened the broad swells of his cheeks. Because he could have done nothing else, he obeyed Will. He held Will's gaze even as his breaths went short and shallow. The mask tipped subtly into an expression of tenderness, almost of thankfulness. Will hoped that that thing in there felt loved.

As Hannibal finished, his eyes stayed obstinately open. He seemed to be trying to open his pupils up and show Will what was inside. In that silent language of his, he begged for Will to look. Will leaned down and closed his eyes and kissed him.

They lay together afterward, side by side. Will's elbow touched Hannibal's forearm and his hip touched Hannibal's hip.

'Listen to the rain,' Hannibal said.

Without his intending it, Will's hearing seemed to close to all sound but the rain. Heard from indoors, rain was the sound of warmth and comfort, fireplaces and Irish coffee. Sometimes dead power lines and emergency radio broadcasts. Will saw a flash of Freddie Lounds on his porch, telling Will about why she did not mind what had happened to her. Telling him to go. The whiskey in the cups, the gun oil. When Will looked to his side, he found that Hannibal had folded his arms over his stomach and closed his eyes. Hannibal saw nothing of what Will saw.

 

* * *

 

The thunder was rumbling and Hannibal was asleep. Will brushed a hand over Hannibal's forehead, mimicking the way Hannibal liked to push back his fringe. Hannibal's eyes did not so much as flicker beneath his eyelids, and so Will rose from the bed.

The apartment looked somehow different. Will moved through it seeing everything: the ormolu clock, the clavichord, the dishes drying in the rack, the near-empty decanter of whiskey. He reminded himself to buy more, then remembered why it would not matter. He unstopped the decanter, poured himself two fingers neat, and tucked the crystal stopper into his jacket pocket. It hit heavily against his side as he walked.

When he had first come to find Hannibal, the sound of the rain made him feel hidden. The apartment was a world apart from any other; no living man could have entered it. Hannibal had chosen this place with a view to being happy in it and found instead that he grieved, that his world was given over to shadows. Days after, when the sun shone and they shucked oysters, they seemed to pass into the world of the living. It had been a trick of the light: with Hannibal it was always a trick of the light.

So long as Will was alive and in love with him, Hannibal would wait here. He would keep the decanters stocked with whiskey and turn down the linen on both sides of the bed. He would have great faith in Will. To himself he would say, When he whom I love returns...

Of course Will would return. If not in this life, they would meet in the place for the great traitors. There they would not be parted. Will put his suitcase by the door, then went into the bathroom and washed with Hannibal's soap. He scrubbed the scent so deeply into him that his skin went raw and red.

The corridor was dark, and his shadow, diffuse in the low light, slipped like a shade alongside him. In the sitting room, in the armchair, silhouetted against the windows, Hannibal sat with his legs crossed and his arms along the arms of the chair.

Will stood still for a moment in acknowledgment of Hannibal's presence. He could see little of Hannibal's face; the light was behind him. If Hannibal wanted to keep Will, he could put his arm around Will's neck and put him to sleep and inject him with things that made him gentle. But that would be giving up on Will. No, no, Hannibal said to himself, When he whom I love—

Even with the door shut before him, Will felt he had crossed the threshold. He had been ferried across the river. Hannibal could not cross in search of him. For a very long time, Hannibal would wander the shore, peering out into the mist.

'It's too bad,' Will said. 'It could have been nicer than this.'

'Go on,' Hannibal said. He nodded towards the door.

'I'll see you.' Will was moving farther and farther from the shore.

Across the river, the mist was taking Hannibal into it. Soon he would be gone. Already he had been made mute: he had said the one phrase that could carry across the river, and now his lips moved silently. Will took his case in hand and went.

On the street below, Will looked over his shoulder, upwards. He knew which window was Hannibal's but did not search it out. He felt that if he were to turn back, open the gate and go through the courtyard and ascend the stairs, he would find that someone he had never met answered the door to an apartment he had never been inside. 'Does Dr. Fell live here?' Will would ask, and the stranger would say, 'I don't know anyone by that name.'

 

* * *

 

He had coffee at a restaurant by the train station. S.D. would not have hit the papers yet; the headlines had to do with banking scandals and a worker's strike. Will sat before the window and watched the reflections of the people in the restaurant waver over the passers in the street. He felt alone, inconsequential; he felt like he was coming up from deep water, or a long dream. The coffee was bitter and he sipped it slowly, waiting for the rain to ease up.

Then he was looking out the picture window of the train car. The rain moved jaggedly across the glass, trembling with the speed of the train. Beneath, the wheels clunked along the track. He had his hand in his jacket pocket and the crystal stopper was warm in his palm.

A few rows down, a passenger whispered to the man in the seat next to him. He tilted up the screen of his mobile and said, 'Did you hear about the murder up in Gennevilliers? They found this fellow...'

Will leaned against the window. The brown fields—the train was in the countryside—slid vaguely past. He saw the raindrops most clearly.

'Retract what?' the second man asked. Someone else in the car hushed him.

The first passenger whispered, 'They say there was a politician...'

When Will dozed he dreamed about a storm on Erie he had seen from the marina in the Cleveland Harbor. Great flags of water whirled up and crashed against the breakwall. Spray spotted Will's face and dampened his clothes. He had been maybe fifteen, brown from being out on the water in the sun, and still his father said, 'Now I wouldn't go out in that.'

'I would, sure,' Will had said, but he stood on the marina with his father.

He opened his eyes, sometimes, at the rustling of passengers moving through the train car. Though his eyes were open he was mostly asleep and he saw the rain on the window as the spots of wave-foam hanging in the air, falling.

There was another time he remembered, back in Mississippi. The bay, as it crept inland, feathered out into a hundred winding rivers, twisting thinly between bay-side roads before reaching the deep woods and narrowing into nothing. If he left his house by the back door and cut through the woods for a bit, he would come onto a one-lane country road that led out to a river kids liked to play in. In places, the banks were maybe five or ten feet above the water, even when it had rained, and some old trees leaned out near halfway across. Kids would shimmy out on the thin branches and tie ropes around them so that they could swing off of the ropes and into the water.

Some worrying parents told the story of a boy who hit his head on a rock and sunk down to the bottom of the river. Will knew it for a lie because he always knew lies. He knew that there were no little bones down there in the muddy bed. Even then he got a shiver at the kids who would dive down to the bottom and come up wild-eyed, crying about the bones they had felt. They never lied, not as far as they knew; they had brushed against a branch or a piece of trash and felt it like it was bone.

Anyway, no matter how he shivered, Will would climb up on the ropes and swing out. He remembered it the way the body sometimes does: as if he were still in motion, his palms rubbing raw on the rope, his body flung out and carried forward by the force of his jump. The water seemed very far below. For the second between letting go of the rope and hitting the surface of the water, it felt like someone forgot to let him down. He had always hit the water but remembered it like he hadn't, like the first time he jumped he had not fallen but stayed floating always, stopped between that place and the other.

 

* * *

 

_iv. flowers on the door_

Years later, Hannibal looked into his letter box and found a small envelope, yellowed and smudged by long travel. It had been postmarked in Brazil; there was no return address. A feather was drawn in black ink on the letterhead.

> _Hannibal,_
> 
> _It is the end of summer here and I was thinking of you. I was remembering you refusing to tell me a story I had wanted to hear. I don't want to know the story now, so don't bother looking me up. It was only that I thought it was funny, what we happen to remember. The south is very pleasant. I am getting along well. Are you? You ought to play that cantata I like, if you haven't lately._
> 
> _Will._

 


End file.
